Re: gnome-terminal idea

[Tim Moore <tmoore tembel org>]

On Tue, 22 Sep 1998, George wrote:

> one idea for gnome-terminal .... use mdi?
> 
> does that sound like a good idea or not
> 
> it would definately be nicer to be able to have multiple
> sessions open in one window (with a tab notebook) or
> the way it's now

This brings me to a general question I have:

Why on earth does anybody like the GNOME-MDI? (Or any MDI, for that
matter)

I don't mean to offend anyone, I just don't see what the advantages are to
using notebook pages instead of top-levels. I know you can set your
preference in Look and Feel Properties, I just wonder why anyone would
rather have multiple views in one window.

The disadvantages:

* You can't tile the windows next to each other.
* It's application rather than document-centric, where windows represent
abstract application controls rather than a frame for the current
document/task/whatever.
* It breaks the autonomy of individual document windows.
* It eats screen real-estate

The advantages:

* It's easy to see how many open documents there are in the frontmost
application.
* It's easy to switch between them.

But it seems to me that these advantages can be better conferred by a good
window manager. I *far* prefer to have multiple maximized top-levels which
I can either alt-tab between or put on different desktops, or put next to
each other at half-screen width, depending on my mood.

Perhaps I'm missing something...so let me know.

While I'm blabbing, I may as well contribute useful ideas too :-)

I'm using the current RPMs, so this may have been fixed in CVS (ignore me
if so), but my gnome-terminal has two annoying quirks. One, when I select
lines of text (either intentionally or because an accidental click selects
a line, which is another issue in itself) they don't go away when I click.
In fact, they only go away when the terminal writes over that area of the
screen. This can lead to some minor ugliness. Two, it doesn't handle
Preferences quite right. If you pull up the dialog, instead of setting the
controls to their *current* values, it seems to always set them to the
*default* values. Which means that if I want to change the color, I have
to change the font and scrollbar position again or else they jump back to
the factory presets. This is *quite* annoying.

Tim