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On 7-Jun-06, at 8:51 PM, Ronald G Minnich wrote:
What if you had a window manager that could be recursive? that
would set it up so you can name windows by a path name? that would
let you treat the recursive desktops -- to any level -- as just
another window? that would trivially allow you to connect mouse
clicks in a window to control actions for one or more other windows
(i.e. you could logically group windows and then control all of
them via mouse clicks)? That would maybe let you easily connect
output from a process in one window to another? that would let you
build little widgets that could easily control other windows? That
would let you display all window state in another window? That
would let you set, say, all windows with a browser with the label
abaco-### (### a number), with a simple text command; and let you
find all windows with the label abaco.* with, in the limit, a grep?
That would make it easy to group all windows with the label
'abaco.*' so that you could say 'hide all abaco' with a simple script?
Wouldn't that be neat? I mean, that's a real bitch in X, right?
Except ... you already have it.
And this is what makes me such a fan of the Plan 9 model.
Now if people wanted to do something "end-user-ish" perhaps they
could produce those little handy tools, and hook them up to some
simple window decorations (but that still somehow work the natural
way they do now - perhaps a "decorated" mirror file server).
But the effort is doomed to failure - end-user-pleasers want more eye
candy than can be coordinated without a good professional designer
riding whip on the project.
I'm a big fan of the extreme wire-it-together we get from unixish
tools + plan 9 file servers, but it's an environment for experts, not
end-users.
Paul
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