On Tue, May 09, 2017 at 03:27:54PM +0100 I heard the voice of
Aaron Sloman, and lo! it spake thus:
>
> Anyhow, the more important point is that the introduction of tabs in
> browsers has changed what is and isn't dumb. Firefox makes it
> possible to have multiple windows each with multiple tabs.
Eh, I dunno that that actually changes anything really. At least from
outside the browser; from the WM side, it's just another way the
window title can change.
> I use this as part of my long term working memory (needed for an
> aging brain...).
I like to pretend my brain isn't aging. As long as I lose my memory
at least as fast as my cognitive skills, my brain keeps working as
well as I can ever remember it working :)
I've usually got, say, maybe 2-6 Firefox windows in each workspace (in
partially overlapping subsets), with each one having somewhere in the
low to stupid-high dozens of tabs.
> Does anyone really want a window icon to move up and down in the
> iconmanager depending on which tab is open in that window?
For me, personally? I don't care _too_ much one way or another when
it comes to the browser windows, since I hardly ever have more than 5
or 6 in any workspace to begin with. But I do care a lot for the
non-browser icon manager, since it gets up into dozens of windows
quickly, and having them sorted by the name[0] makes life waaaay
easier.
> If I want to change the order in the iconmanager, I use the Workspace
> manager to move some windows temporarily to another workspace and then drag
> them back in the desired order.
Yeah, _that_ is just crazy ;p
Really, the NoSort case only makes sense to me if we DO have a way to
manually resort things. Sort means it gets sorted by name; that's
deterministic. NoSort means it's totally _non_deterministic; they
wind up showing up in the order they were added to the icon manager,
which means when the window shows up, when its occupation changes,
when a name/class change happens to trigger assigning it to an iconmgr
it wasn't on before... and that's before we even get into the
arbitrarily different order they get picked back up in when you
restart. Carambe!
> If the new default is preserved, I suggest adding a warning on the
> Ctwm web site, informing people trying the new system for the first
> time, [...]
Well. It's documented in the CHANGES file along with all the other
things changing in 4 that existing users should take cognizance of.
It doesn't make much sense to me to single it out for new users;
_everything_ ctwm is going to do is gonna be different or surprising
to them, the sorting of the icon manager is probably gonna be number
120-something of 300 on the list.
> (You may have survey results I don't know about?)
I didn't run any precise numbers, but the overwhelming majority of the
configs I could find of ctwm or closely related WM's that had the
equivalent of ShowIconManager also had SortIconManager. Our
system.ctwmrc doesn't have Show, of the 2 examples in our tree that
have Show one has Sort. Both 2d and 3d system.vtwmrc's for vtwm have
Sort, as does the contrib vtwmrc that includes Show. All 3 of the
shipped sample twmrc's in twm have Sort. fvwm's config defaults to
sorting by name (it provides other options for sorting in different
ways). Poking around at what people's configs I could find on the web
nearly always had it sorted.
>From here, it seemed like a pretty solid case that if you're using an
icon manager, you probably want it sorted. Certainly the contrary is
conceivable (which is why I left it conditional and added the NoSort
keyword for it), but that certainly seems like the exceptional case
rather than the common one. So I thought (and still think) it's the
Obviously Right(tm) default.
Now, we haven't shipped 4.0.0 yet, so there's certainly time to change
our minds about it. I'm absolutely open to discussion of the right
choice. I mean, ideally, I'm open to that discussion in March, but
hey, better Nate than lever. Part of the point of bumping the major
release number is to take the chance to reevaluate choices made in the
previous millennium. Up until we cut the release, it's pretty easy to
switch things any which way.
For me, though, the only argument that would make much sense would be
"this is the more common and better case". "It was the previous
default" by itself is IMO a pretty week argument. I mean, if it's
50:50, totally stick with what it's been in the past. If it's 60:40
(in favor of the changed, I mean), sure, that's no reason to eat the
overhead of making the change. But I think it's more like 80:20 or
90:10 or more, and to me that absolutely makes it boilerplate, not
config.
But, hey; convince me it's 50:50, or 20:80, and I'll be behind
swapping the default back. Or for that matter, it _is_ ctwm after
all, not fullermdwm; if The Community At Large wants it the other way
I'll go with that.
[0] For anybody looking for an excuse to get into ctwm hackery, there
_is_ a little bug in the sorting. The icon manager resorts when a
window name changes, but it only resorts the icon managers in the
current workspace, and switching workspaces doesn't resort the
iconmgr. So if you have a window in multiple workspaces and
rename it while in one, it winds up out of order in the others.
--
Matthew Fuller (MF4839) | [email protected]
Systems/Network Administrator | http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.
