Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!ll-xn!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!uw-june!geops!rainy!jeff
From: jeff@rainy.atmos.washington.edu (efBwe)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Why window managers? (was Re: output in icons)
Summary: Interface consistency
Message-ID: <155@rainy.atmos.washington.edu>
Date: 27 Jun 88 21:51:58 GMT
References: <22428@think.UUCP> <8806221643.AA00408@scrod.ardent.com>
Organization: Dept. of Atmospheric Sciences, U. of Washington
Lines: 34

In article <8806221643.AA00408@scrod.ardent.com>, jkh@ardent.UUCP writes:
> What the window manager buys you more than anything else is the ability
> to change the "look and feel" (oh no! lawsuit! lawsuit!) of an arbitrary
> set of client windows without having to recompile them with a different
> toolkit (or whatever library you implement to handle window management at the
> client level). You're free to run any window manager you want, and as
> long as it follows some reasonable set of conventions, the client doesn't
> have to know which one it is.

I think that's what window managers are for too.  But it's not enough. I'd
like to see a more general manager that handles more context sensitive things
such as scroll bars and menus.  Users have different preferences about these
sorts of things as well.

Take xterm (X11) for example.  I, personally, am driven up the wall by the
xterm scroll bar.  When I press the left mouse button it, intuitively enough,
displays an upward pointing arrow but it moves the window *down*.  I would
also like it to have real estate driven menu selection as well so I don't
have to press the control key to get the menus up and remember which button
runs which menu.

These are things which I should be able to fix in all applications uniformly
by specifying preferences to some manager.  It's true that this would
complicate the world a bit by making applications dependant on the window
manager for such things but this could be solved by having them handled in
a default way by X itself and grabbed by clients (particularly window
managers).  For example, if an application has several menus all with titles
it could notify the system of their existence and if there was no window
manager to handle them the system could default to displaying them in a stacked
fashion when any mouse button is pressed in the window for that application.
A window manager could then grab them and assign them to particular buttons
or to special regions on the screen (in the title bar perhaps).

I think the more user interface functionality we can put into a more global
manager the better off we'll be in terms of consistency.