Havoc Pennington wrote: > 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?" I was hoping for a line a bit further from Windows XP! ;-) >>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. OK, now that sounds promising. > 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. That sounds good too. I personally have gotten used to using the right button for this, mostly because I don't have a 3-button mouse on all of my systems, but I could deal with chording 2 buttons if I had too. > 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. I saw that, but I haven't yet jumped into the fray. I'm not an active Gnome developer, so I thought I would hang out and watch for a while. [snip] >>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. Yes, I'm aware of the lisp barrier. It took me ten minutes to figure out how to make a simple button change, and that was just a theme file. > 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... OK, I can understand that. > 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. Alternatively, if sawfish _doesn't_ shape up I think it would be good to reinstate FVWM in the distro. A window manager with a scary default configuration that works is better than a nice looking one that doesn't. As an alternative to adding individual preferences to metacity, you might consider adding them as a group. That way you just have two configurations (WINDOZE and OLD_UNIX_DOG) to debug instead of a combinatorial explosion of configurations. This of course gets back to the problem that no-one has the same five favorite features, but you might find consensus for a core group of features. If this alternate configuration silences half of us whiners, then I think you come out ahead. TC
