Re: close button on terminal tabs

[Evan Martin <martine danga com>]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2003 at 09:52:20AM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > I imagine this has been already flamed^Wdiscussed to death, but
> > shouldn't there be an optional protocol for "subwindows" (placement,
> > etc.) between toolkit and WM/pagers/etc. ? Or at least some
> > well-thought toolkit helper ?  Having a specific inconsistent
> > behavior for each application isn't that pretty.
> 
> Sure. We want a "main document window" widget for GTK 2.6 and this
> would be part of it - currently lacking a volunteer to implement it,
> though.

Is there a good argument why tabbing shouldn't be handled by the window
manager?[1]  

Gain:
 - All applications only need to support multiple windows and they'd get
   tabbing for free.  No more "should multiple documents be done as tabs
   or toplevel windows" question.
 - Consistent keybinding-- no more alt+num in gnome-terminal, but
   ctl+num in firebird.  (I can't even remember which gaim uses.)

The arguments against it that I can see revolve around the fact that
applications wouldn't be aware of tabs:
 - Can't save things like "tab state"-- some web browsers use it.
 - Some applications might have behavior that is tab-specific-- I think
   the "location" box in firebird does weird things because it isn't
   completely per-window.

If this has been done to death before, feel free to just point me at
that and I'll shut up.  :)


[1] http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/pwm/
    http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net/features/tabs.php

-- 
Evan Martin
martine danga com
http://neugierig.org