The Alan Bown Set Before and Beyond
I’m experimenting with a new concept in window managers, exemplified by WMI. The idea is that the window manager should manage the windows, not the user. So instead of a mess of overlapping frames that constantly need dragging around and resizing, the screen is divided into a set of non-overlapping frames.
The first program you run fills the whole screen. The next program you run fills the whole screen too, and switching between the two is achieved using a familiar tab representation. But now it is also possible to split the screen horizontally or vertically into frames. Each frame can contain one or more tabbed windows, be resized, and further sub-divided. Each window can be sent to an alternative frame.
The result is a very neat and tidy windowing system, with the added bonus that keyboard shortcuts become practical for moving windows around the screen. Typically I have the main applications such as a web browser and email on the left, and small windows containing shells and editors on the right, as shown in the screen shot.
WMI is still very new, and there are a few glitches, especially with applications that display a lot of dialog boxes. It’s a bit disconcerting when an “OK” box suddenly fills the whole screen, but thankfully it is possible to convert these boxes into traditional floating windows. I’m sure if I rummaged through the documentation I would find a way to make “floating” the default mode for new windows.
In any case, it’s a whole new, refreshing way of working with a PC, and all the more fun for it.
Posted by site admin in Open Source