arul@sdsu.UUCP (Arul Ananthanarayanan) (06/21/88)
Greetings, We have just gotten X11 running. I was wondering about the ability to see output in small icons. This feature existed in the X10 window manager but seems to be absent in uwm. I could not find it at quick perusal of 'awm' either. Does this feature exist in X11 or is it a remnant of X10 uwm? What I mean by output in small icons is that in X10 you could see the ouput of icon'ed xterms on the screen, altough very small it was an attractive feature. Thanks, Arul -- San Diego State University Math Sciences Dept. Celerity 1230 BSD 4.3 UUCP: ....!ucsd!sdsu!arul work:(619) 265-5797 ARPA: arul%sdsu.uucp@ucsd.edu home:(619) 583-0439
ogata@LEVIATHAN.CS.UMD.EDU (Jeff Ogata) (06/21/88)
The xterm active icon feature in X10 was handled by xterm, not by the window manager. I'm told that this feature has been removed from xterm in X11, and that window managers are handling iconification these days. Which brings me to a point that has been bothering me for a while now... Why window managers? It seems to me that separating tasks from the clients such as window resizing and iconification, without giving clients full control of these actions, has caused a lot of headaches. I'm confused as to the actual utility of window managers. Couldn't all the functions of the window manager be handled by default widget code that the clients had more control over? Or something? Am I missing something obvious that only window managers can do adequately? - Jeff Ogata
swick@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ralph R. Swick) (06/27/88)
> What I mean by output in small icons is that in X10 you could see the > ouput of icon'ed xterms on the screen, altough very small it was an > attractive feature. This was actually implemented internally in xterm and xted, not in any generic way. The original porters of xterm from X10 to X11 removed this facility for philosophical reasons. Their argument is that window managers (read "specific user interfaces aka looks&feel") want to distinguish between the user actions "clear this window from the screen but leave me a handle in a well-known place [icon] to retrieve it" and "leave this window [application] active but make it as small as possible and put it out of the way somewhere". For some people, it was convenient that the same interactions with uwm caused both actions, depending on command-line arguments to the application. The capability is likely to re-appear in some form in xterm eventually, with semantics more like "change the font[s] in this window".