Ted Clark <bison@visi.com> writes: > 1. I see from reading http://www106.pair.com/rhp/free-software-ui.html > on your home page that you are strongly in favor or removing > preferences from software. Well, let's qualify that a bit. As I argue on that page, the question is not "prefs good"/"prefs bad" but "where do you draw the line?" > The problem is when 1 and 2 are combined together: the result is easy > to use (for most users) software that is frustrating for skilled users > because of its limitations. In the case of window managers, asking > experienced users to give up a convenient way to lower windows, or > maximize windows along a single axis, or any number of other things, > is like asking them to give up cut and paste or tab key completion. Well, I'm fairly open to having those features. They don't necessarily have to be prefs or optional though. Right now middle-click titlebar in metacity doesn't do anything; I think it's clear that "lower window" is the most popular possible use for that, and I'm leaning toward making it do that. And I don't have a problem with adding keybindings for both lower window and vert/horz maximize. Those bugs are open on gnome.org. > 1. Have defaults in metacity that work well for most users, and > configuration options for the rest of us. Really obscure and hard to > configure options for all I care, just as long as the end result is a > sharp knife and not a rubber mallot. > > 2. Ship a second, highly configurable window manager THAT'S ACTUALLY > SUPPORTED! Putting some priority on getting sawfish fixed so that it > can be used without running 'killall rep' on a regular basis would be > appreciated. > It's really hard to support a highly configurable window manager. John Harper was always really helpful with Sawfish, but even then we had a ton of open bugs on it, and had a lot of trouble fixing them ourselves due to the elisp barrier. The interaction with GNOME and KDE is also quite complex these days, and the WM needs to be synced up properly with the desktop. We have only one or two people with the skillz to hack on window managers, including me, and I just don't expect to have time to support one of these things - half the reason metacity is simple is that it should be, the other half is that there's no time to do it any other way... If John makes a new Sawfish release, I'll build it and drop it in gnomehide for people to see if it's errata-worthy. I'm happy to build the package; I just can't really sign up to actively hack on it. Havoc
