Re: [Usability]Re: killing programs in taskbar

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sat, Nov 09, 2002 at 05:18:23PM -0800, Michael Toomim wrote:
> 
> How about implementing metacity's "kill unresponsive apps" mechanism in 
> the tasklist instead of adding a "kill" command to the tasklist?
> 
> I don't use metacity, and so for me, there's no way to kill an 
> application without resorting to the command line or 
> gnome-system-monitor.  Furthermore, it makes sense that the "close" item 
> of the tasklist should do the same thing as the "close" button in metacity.
> 

The "close" item in the tasklist sends a standard, specified-in-EWMH
message to the window manager, asking the WM to close the window.  The
reason for this is to ensure that choosing "close" in the tasklist is
exactly equivalent to clicking the close button or choosing close from
the window menu. The "detect unresponsive apps" feature is also in the
EWMH, as is the implementation suggestion to use it when closing
windows.

The WM defines what happens when you close a window.  If your WM could
do a better job of that, should patch it or file a bug report for your
WM. Things get all broken if you start having every component of the
desktop duplicating every other component in case one of them doesn't
work well...

Havoc