On Tue, Feb 13, 2007 at 04:46:30PM +0100, Anselm R. Garbe wrote: > I don't understand why people ask for such mixture-layouts (in dwm > we had the same discussion already). Actually, I think you only need > such mixture layouts, if your screen is too small. So, the real > solution for the problem in my eyes is: wether use a floating setup, > or buy a bigger screen.
How do I buy a bigger screen for my laptop? I can't, so I have to use a floating setup when I want to mix a wide window with two narrow ones? That doesn't suck less: it sucks more. > Apart from that, I believe that windows in rows scale poorly > compared to windows in columns, because in my observation the > width of a window is of much more importance than its height. > And there's also a reason for this observation - it is text. In > western civilizations we usually read line-based (regardless if > from left-to-right or vice versa), but text expands into the > width. Hence you can easily handle more than 20 windows in a > column, but you can hardly handle more than 5 columns at all > (this makes windows nearly unusable). The issue is is not scalability. None of my "mere mortal" friends (including myself) ever have 20 windows in a column, or even, frankly, 5 in a row. We're not talking about managing tens of windows here (or at least I'm not). We're talking about flexible (but nicely managed) layout options for a few windows. It is a _genuine_ use case to want one wide window and several (or maybe even just two!) on a small screen (eg a laptop screen). Audio editing is one example but there are others. > Or you just adapt your usage patterns to column layout (which is > doable) and maybe you want to buy a better screen. Column layout doesn't work well with windows which want to be wide. Buying a better screen is not an option in many circumstances. Using the floating (or managed, or whatever you call it) layer defeats a large part of the purpose of using a window manager like wmii in the first place. -Andy -- Andy Gimblett Computer Science Department University of Wales Swansea http://www.cs.swan.ac.uk/~csandy/
