Re: A Violent Realisation [Was: Preferences]

[John Sheehan <John Sheehan Sun COM>]

On 29Apr2002 02:09PM (-0400), Havoc Pennington wrote:
>
> - having both viewports and desktops makes the 
>   prefs dialog for the pager much larger than it currently 
>   is, and requires people to understand a fairly hard-to-explain 
>   concept.
> - having both viewports and desktops makes a lot of subtle UI
>   behaviors (like what happens when you reopen a dialog that's
>   already open on another viewport/desktop, or how Xinerama/multihead
>   work) harder to get right
> - having both viewports and desktops adds substantial implementation 
>   complexity to both the pager and the window manager
> - having both viewports and desktops traditionally means that there's
>   an odd and random division of features between the two (viewports
>   have certain keybindings or edge flipping, while desktops don't, 
>   purely for implementation laziness reasons)
> - having the choice confuses many users
>

As someone involved in documentation, I have to agree strongly with all 
of the above - it's a pig to try and easily put across the concept of
workspaces, viewports, and their very many attendant configuration 
options.  If it is difficult to document, that is typically a sign of
a usability issue.

Maciej's proposal of a single checkbox to control whether windows can 
be pushed past the edge of the screen would definitely be a lot simpler 
UI-wise even if it precludes having both "workspaces" and "viewports" 
simultaneously.

- John