On Mar 3, 2006, at 10:38 PM, Doug Bell wrote:

You're complaining about a single keystroke (<1 second) to clear the
history when desired.  And you probably wouldn't do it all that often,
anyway, since keeping the history just means you go back to an
arrangement you had before as you add clients.

Does it also tell you what the column layout was? Personally, I'd prefer a way to "save" layouts and recall them using the 1 through 0 keys. It is very unlikely that I'd have more than a handful of common layouts, so I think this is a nice and deliberate way of working. I'm not arguing against having to spend <1 second. I'm arguing that I shouldn't have to care about things like clearing column history.

Saving an extra second to kill the column seems hardly worth all of
these additional conceptual complexities, key commands, and memory
requirements of the user.

Instead, you're arguing for an empty column. Don't forget that killing an extra column means it has to have focus. So, either the column keeps
focus after the last client is deleted or it loses it. The first case
means thinking about and switching focus to a real client before
resuming work (assuming you want to keep the column).  The second case
requires you to switch focus before being able to kill the empty
column that is taking up valuable space.

How about a "clear all empty columns/frames" key command? If you explicitly create something, you should explicitly remove it. Your idea that you can have a notification that there is a stored state still implies that I must remember what that sorted state is and if I want to recall it or not. Saved layouts are okay as you're explicitly saving them and calling them up often, making memory easy. However, returning to something you had previously makes a lot of assumptions about what you want to be doing, which I do not necessarily like. Just my opinion of course.

- John

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