Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!mit-eddie!bloom-beacon!ATHENA.MIT.EDU!swick
From: swick@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ralph R. Swick)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: output in icons
Message-ID: <8806271355.AA19898@LYRE.MIT.EDU>
Date: 27 Jun 88 13:55:30 GMT
References: <3050@sdsu.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: DEC/MIT Project Athena
Lines: 17

> What I mean by output in small icons is that in X10 you could see the
> ouput of icon'ed xterms on the screen, altough very small it was an
> attractive feature.

This was actually implemented internally in xterm and xted, not in any
generic way.  The original porters of xterm from X10 to X11 removed this
facility for philosophical reasons.  Their argument is that window managers
(read "specific user interfaces aka looks&feel") want to distinguish
between the user actions "clear this window from the screen but leave me
a handle in a well-known place [icon] to retrieve it" and "leave this
window [application] active but make it as small as possible and put it
out of the way somewhere".  For some people, it was convenient that
the same interactions with uwm caused both actions, depending on
command-line arguments to the application.

The capability is likely to re-appear in some form in xterm eventually,
with semantics more like "change the font[s] in this window".