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Rethinking Window Management

blogs.gnome.org

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91–100 of 272 posts

Re: Rethinking Window Management

#91

Post by mulmen »

I understand the desire to make changes, especially from people so close to a project. But as a user it is painful. If I could think of any positive changes in the last 20 years maybe I would have a different reaction. But I can't so I don't.

Every time I have attempted to interact with Gnome has been incredibly frustrating. I have an uncomfortable visceral reaction to even seeing a Gnome desktop.

But bad design isn't unique to Gnome. In the modern world we love data, but I think we are bad at collecting what matters. The number of times I say "fuck you" out loud to my iPhone in a day is non-zero. A good designer should care when that happens.

So, sure, move my windows around without asking. Continue with your misguided belief that you know better than me what I want. But give me a big red "fuck you" button to click when you get it wrong.

Re: Rethinking Window Management

#92

Post by elteto »

soulofmischief wrote: post #31

I wish Gnome would stop rethinking things and just reimplement the basic desktop features every major competitor has, and that Gnome 2 had.

Starting with something as basic as bringing back the path input textbox in file dialogs. I mean... it's a file dialog! What else but inputting file _paths_ is it good for?

Re: Rethinking Window Management

#93

Post by iamcalledrob »

People generally have pretty good spatial sensibilities, and I feel like modern OS designers seem to forget this. You feel this especially on iPadOS.

Physically arranging windows allows for a much more solid multi-tasking experience, and encouraged direct manipulation of content e.g. drag and drop. Transient "palette" or "panel" windows allow for a short term buffer (think a find/replace panel). To me, this is what made macOS so great for creative tasks. It activated my spatial memory.

I'm grumpy about the recent trend towards apps living in one monolithic window. Apple's going down this route with their recent app redesigns from multi-window to single window, likely due to a (selfish) desire to unify with iPadOS. Electron adds a dev tax for multiple windows, such that folks don't really think to do it.

I think this trend is probably due to the convergence of desktop app design with the web, which is inherently single window -- and traces its roots back to window.open() being abused by pop-up ads.

It's unfortunate because a single window user experience is limiting -- and people are forgetting that anything else is even possible. I miss the days when chat apps had separate windows for each chat, and a buddy list you could pin to the side of the screen.

(If you've only ever got comfortable with a windows-style "maximised window" approach, you'll probably disagree with me, however).

Re: Rethinking Window Management

#94

Post by uhmyeh »

MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #65

Clearly I am a very simple person, and I don't get all these window management wars. Almost all my workflows either involve one maximised windows, two windows side by side, or occasionally one smaller windowed floating on top of another. Linux does that for me by default. You can get the float on top in Windows with some 3re party tools, although it isn't as nicely integrated. What is everyone doing that needs someth…

[flagged]

Re: Rethinking Window Management

#96

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

nickstinemates wrote: post #79
MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #65

Clearly I am a very simple person, and I don't get all these window management wars. Almost all my workflows either involve one maximised windows, two windows side by side, or occasionally one smaller windowed floating on top of another. Linux does that for me by default. You can get the float on top in Windows with some 3re party tools, although it isn't as nicely integrated. What is everyone doing that needs someth…

Some people like beer, some people like wine, some people like sugary drinks. Why don't people just drink water?

I'm not saying that everyone should be like me. I am genuinely asking what the use cases are for something else.

Re: Rethinking Window Management

#97

Post by dsr_ »

pmontra wrote: post #70

Gnome developers really like automoving stuff on the screen, like activities animations. Instead I could kill a window that does not stay put were I placed it. Who does it thinks it is to know better than me how my desktop must look like? Anyway, until there is a way to work as I want to, no problem with them enjoying their time. Reconfiguring the desktop to look like Gnome 2 is a tax I pay to have them keeping it co…

I rejected paying that tax, and moved to XFCE.

As far as I can tell, the GNOME people have not had a good idea about window management since GNOME 2. If you like it, great, use it. The point of freedom is to be able to do things they way you like.

Re: Rethinking Window Management

#98

Post by ElectricalUnion »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #40
dugmartin wrote: post #13

I've been using i3 (within the larger Regolith package) for a few years now and its hard for me to non-tiling WMs now. However I do think there would be a lot of improvements, especially with large desktop monitors. One idea I had would be to have a window manager only have a single main window in each desktop and then scaled down windows around the border on the desktop, like the TV in Idiocracy ( https://www.sounda…

Dynamic tiling window managers like dwm and xmonad can do this. They default to a 'master/stack' layout but you can change the layout algorithm. You esentially have a 'master' window and a stack of secondary windows. You can promote a window with super+enter and it gets swapped into the master area. There are some autotiling scripts for i3 that can emulate this behavior as well.

I thought that xmonad just changed the windows dimensions and location for most of the layout configurations, can it change scale of the windows as well?

Re: Rethinking Window Management

#99

Post by Scene_Cast2 »

MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #65

Clearly I am a very simple person, and I don't get all these window management wars. Almost all my workflows either involve one maximised windows, two windows side by side, or occasionally one smaller windowed floating on top of another. Linux does that for me by default. You can get the float on top in Windows with some 3re party tools, although it isn't as nicely integrated. What is everyone doing that needs someth…

Here are some sample workflows where I have a bunch of different windows open. But I also have three screens (38" ultrawide - so I have close to 180* of screen around me).

* Full stack dev. One window for backend code (sub-tiled into two or three editor windows). One window for terminal (subtiled into two or three consoles). One window for Sublime with various notes and configs. One window for front-end code. And a bunch of minimized windows for docker desktop, file managers, Chrome, etc etc.

* 3D graphics. One window (sub-tiled into a couple of views) for 3D viewing and editing. One window for reference materials and textures. One window for render output.

* Scientific compute. A window with PDFs; window with Chrome with towardsdatascience / kaggle / stackoverflow; window subtiled into several ipynb (editor) views. Maybe some more diagrams / graphs / etc for a good measure.

Re: Rethinking Window Management

#100

Post by ur-whale »

MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #65

Clearly I am a very simple person, and I don't get all these window management wars. Almost all my workflows either involve one maximised windows, two windows side by side, or occasionally one smaller windowed floating on top of another. Linux does that for me by default. You can get the float on top in Windows with some 3re party tools, although it isn't as nicely integrated. What is everyone doing that needs someth…

> What is everyone doing that needs something else?

You omitted to explain what you do for a living.

I write code for a living, and what you describe simply doesn't work for me given the many different things I need to look at and refer to in parallel (without having to perform a hard context switch such as moving to another workspace or un-maximizing a window) to be able to cobble together code that works.

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