[48] in Athena User Interface
Re: sawfish configuration
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dan Winship)
Thu May 18 10:11:27 2000
Message-Id: <200005181412.KAA14025@twelve-monkeys.helixcode.com>
To: Brad Thompson <yak@MIT.EDU>
Cc: aui@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 17 May 2000 21:17:58 EDT."
<200005180117.VAA11391@manatee.mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 18 May 2000 10:12:56 -0400
From: Dan Winship <danw@helixcode.com>
My belated comments.
First, I agree with what Maciej said about "your own unusual
preferences" or whatever it was.
Second, don't forget that (a) sawfish is very themable, (b) there are
lots of themes out there for people to pick from, and (c) they almost
all share certain core functionality that you're talking about
changing. Having the Athena theme be different from all other themes
could be weird.
> * 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.
This seems to assume that people will change their Gtk theme but not
their sawfish theme, which seems like an odd assumption given that
they're equally trivial to change.
There aren't that many sawfish themes that track Gtk themes, and no
one seems to mind. Many WM themes come with suggestions on matching
gtk themes, and Helix Code has someone working on "metatheme"
packaging this summer (ie, Gtk themes packaged with matching sawmill,
Enlightenment, IceWM, etc themes, and some sort of picker to set all
of them together). No idea on the time frame of getting that out
though. I can find out if you want.
> * 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".
"send to taskbar" *is* "iconify". That's what sawfish calls it, that's
the name of the lisp function, etc. I believe in the latest version,
you can choose to have real icons instead, but that's just changing
the behavior of "iconify", not changing the binding to a different
function (meaning if the user picks the "real icons" setting, you
can't forcibly override it).
Don't Windows and MacOS both put "close" on the opposite side of the
title bar from min/max? Someone here commented that it's easier to hit
maximize of it's the outermost button and you don't have to worry
about hitting "close" instead.
> * There should be no window-manager menu in the top left corner of
> the window or anywhere else. They make me feel dirty.
Then take a shower. And then go watch users. In my experience, they
use the wm menus a lot, even for things that can be down with
mouseclicks, because they don't know the relevant mouseclicks. (Eg,
button3 in the title or border in sawfish will raise the window if
it's not on top, or lower it if it is, but there's no way to just know
that [unless you turn on sawfish tooltips])
> * Clicking in the root window should not do anything.
The WM doesn't own the root window, the file manager does. Sawfish
does bind a menu to some click (meta-left maybe?), but the main menu
you get from the root window comes from gmc.
Oh, sawfish also grabs the Start Menu key by default, if you have a
Start Menu key.
> I think "lower" is almost always the wrong thing to do; you want to
> raise the window on the bottom, not lower the one on top.
What if you can't see the bottom window? I guess you can use the panel
task list...
-- Dan
