[40] in Athena User Interface
sawfish configuration
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brad Thompson)
Wed May 17 21:18:04 2000
Message-Id: <200005180117.VAA11391@manatee.mit.edu>
To: aui@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 17 May 2000 21:17:58 -0400
From: Brad Thompson <yak@MIT.EDU>
I'm working on getting the window manager formerly known as sawmill to
work. Since it's not even building automatically yet, I thought I
would send out some ideas for comment before I burn time implementing
them. Here's what I plan to do. Let me know if you have any opinions
on anything. I believe this is mostly consistent with the discovery
report, but I might have diverged in some places.
* We should use a theme that respects the current GTK theme, so the
WM does not need to be reconfigured if the user reconfigures the
colors of their other apps. The theme should be primarily squarish
(like mwm, win95, system 6) as opposed to rounded (like macos 10).
We should keep in mind that it is not a good idea to suck down 500
colormap cells. The default sawmill configuration looks great
on my 8-bit display---unless I run a program that wants colors
other than "black" and "white".
* There should be a title bar. I am undecided on whether I think it
should be the full width of the window (like mwm, win95) or tabbed
(like the sawfish default and twm with SqueezeTitle). The title
should be centered in the title bar.
* There should be three buttons in the title bar. From the outside
going in, they should be "close this window", "maximize/unmaximize",
and "send to taskbar". The buttons should be on the left side if we
choose to do a tabbed title bar. If we do a full width title bar,
I'm inclined to put the on the right, but it doesn't strike me as
particularly important in this case.
* Typing any non-lock modifier when clicking the "close" button should
send an X kill signal to the client instead of a delete. Yes, this
is non-intuitive, but the alternatives (menu option, another button)
are worse. Perhaps a changed icon when a modifier is pressed would
make it better. This is mostly for the benefit of skilled users---I
don't think it should be too obvious because most users do not
understand the distinction between kill and delete signals.
* There should be no window-manager menu in the top left corner of
the window or anywhere else. They make me feel dirty.
* Dragging on the title bar or a side of a window should move it.
Dragging on any window corner should resize it. This is different
than mwm and the discovery report. I think we should have the sides
of windows move instead of resizing them because windows often have
their title bar obscured when a user wants to move them. This is the
behavior of almost every other GUI (with the exception of Win 3.x).
* The WM should be click-to-focus by default, but be easy to change
to mouse-focus. Focus-clicks should not be passed through to apps.
* Clicking in the root window should not do anything. Window ops
are all handled by decorations, preferences are handled by gnomecc,
and applications are launched by the gnome menu. That leaves nothing
useful to do. This also reduces the number of places a user has to
look for things.
* Focusing a window raises it. Raising a window focuses it. The
distinction hurts users heads (myself included).
* There is no way to iconify, restart, quit, or unmap. These are not
necessary window manager functions. If the user wants them, they can
use sawmill-ui to add them themself.
* We should minimize the amount of lisp code used to implement this.
This keeps things easy to change by the user (sawmill-ui while nice,
is not an AI).
yak
