bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) (05/24/88)
yeah...this is the right place... What I honestly don't understand is what is the (user design) attraction of tiling window managers? I tried the one that came with Andrew and thought it was the most annoying thing I'd ever seen as my windows flickered and resized and zipped about as if possessed. It always seems that I have to do some small strategy to get my windows "right" and a tiling window manager just defeats that control. What's the big advantage of merely avoiding overlapped windows at the cost of losing control and ending up with weird sized windows and having them move around so you frequently have to visually scan them all to remember where they are? I don't think "losing" a window due to overlapping is a very good argument since there are any number of ways to solve that, tiling seeming to be a more intrusive approach (eg. a menu in the root window which provides all the windows that can be brought forward, perhaps clients could provide a manager with good descriptive strings for that or even a user could provide it at window creation time via a dialogue box requested by clicking the window to be identified.) Seriously, not a flame, I just truly don't know where this goal came from or why anyone ever decided it was worth putting any effort into, can someone make a case, I am honestly curious, I don't get it. -Barry Shein, Boston University
rusty@velveeta.berkeley.edu (rusty wright) (05/25/88)
One way to look at it is that someone has to do it in order for us to play around with it and realize that it's sometimes not worthwhile. I would like someone to come up with a window manager that only tiles icons (leaving the open windows alone while taking them into account when tiling the icons). -------------------------------------- rusty c. wright rusty@cartan.berkeley.edu ucbvax!cartan!rusty
weiser.pa@XEROX.COM (05/25/88)
There was a paper presented at the CHI '86 conference (full reference below) which offered empirical data that tiled windows were better in may cases, especially for beginning users. For experts the results were not so clear, and perhaps overlapping was even better there. I used a tiled window system everyday, in the Cedar programming environment, and it has its good points and its bad points. I think overall I prefer overlapping--but then I'm more-or-less an expert. -mark S.A. Bly, J.K. Rosenberg, "A comparison of tiled and overlapping windows", Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI'86 Conference Proceedings. Special Issue of the SIGCHI Bulletin, published the Association for Computing Machinery. April 13-17, 1986, pp. 101-106.
Sean.Levy@EDRC.CMU.EDU (05/28/88)
My initial reaction to a tiled window manager (Andrew) was "ugh! I
*hate* this."
However, after using the X window managers (uwm under both 10 and 11
are the only ones I can stand) I've come to the conculsion that there
is a point to tiled window managers (emprical studies
notwithstanding).
My ideal window manager (that I may end up hacking myself, if I ever
get the time) would be a combination tiled/overlapping deal. I would
like to be able to define groups of adjacent windows that tile
relative to each other. This is essentially a more general case of
subwindows, except that I would not care to have any one window in the
group be the parent of the group -- I'd like to be able to treat the
whole thing as an entity if I want to, or to treat individual members
as entities.
I'd also make it so that the whole group could be expanded, e.g. once
you create the group you aren't stuck with that size of rectangle.
And, tiling window groups could, of course, tile relative to one
another.
The reason I find this idea so attractive is that it approximately
models what I'm thinking about the windows on my desktop. There are
related groups of windows, and I need to be able to see the
information in each one of these windows at the same time.
Using (GNU)emacs under X essentially gives me this functionality
(one emacs per group, multiple lisps, files, etc. under each emacs),
but begins to have an effect on the performance of my machine. Essentially,
having emacs use X directly not only for its main window, but also for
emacs windows would do the trick, but I am tending towards thinking that
this is a function more fit for a window manager than an editor, however
flexible this editor may be (of course it could be argued that emacs is
more of an environment than an editor; I don't disagree).
Generally, my compromise now is to have my emacs loaded up with
whatever I'm working on at the moment and to use separate, small,
throw-away xterms for unrelated tasks. A couple times a day I end up
cleaning out my emacs (C-X C-B DDDDDDDDDDX) and loading up another
bunch of stuff. This is satisfactory, but I'd like to have multiple
groups of stuff sitting there at one time so that I can switch when I
get frustrated (let's be honest). Having two or three emacsen, one
with a CommonLisp, another with three csh's, another with two
debuggers, a partridge and a pear tree under them (not even mentioning
to 50-100 or so .c, .lisp and .h files haning around) would put my
valiant Sun3/60 in an amusing but otherwise unuseful state.
If anyone has any comments about such an effort, and specifically
whether they think an emacs or window-manager approach is best, please
drop me a line. I have not seriously gotten into X programing (and
what I have done has been under 10; until a couple of things I do
daily work with have X11 drivers, I'm afraid that I won't be able to
use it as my default environment) and see this as a way to get into
it.
One further note: maybe there should be some sort of Window Manager
Developer's mailing-list/newsgroup? (I read Xpert on a locally
redistributed CMU bboard, which comes from the newsgroup, I think). The
diversity of content in posts to xpert makes it somewhat of a pain to
wade through, particularly after a weekend or if I have been too busy
to look at it for a couple of days.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sean inet email: snl @ edrc.cmu.edu
Nathaniel 4.3bsd inet `talk': snl @ rhine.edrc.cmu.edu
Levy voice: 412/268-2257
CMU address: CMU, EDRC, DH A219, PGH PA 15213 bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) (05/29/88)
Actually, I was a little short-sighted in my question/comment on tiled window managers. There's two issues (at least hypothetically), general desktop and as an application tool. My somewhat negative reaction was to tiling on the desktop. I've used applications that did the same thing within their own, coordinated world (eg. Composer on the Mac is more or less tiling) and it is a fairly natural thing, probably owing to the fact that the purpose of the windows being moved/sized is known about somewhat by the manager. The style seems to weaken the less the manager knows about the purpose of the windows (eg. having an xterm become a thin stripe down the length of the side of the screen is pretty useless and arbitrary if some output comes to it, something I remember cwm doing.) So the issue at least splits down that line, general desktop utility versus an application tool to help the user manage multiple related windows such as pallettes or meters. -Barry Shein, Boston University