Re: powershell/gnome-terminal

[Miles Lane <miles amazon com>]

> Dermot Musgrove <dermot@glade.perl.connectfree.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > Since I am sure there are a lot of folks who feel the way you do,
> > I do believe a tabbed UI should go into gnome-terminal.  I'd just
> > like it to not be the default view.
>
> Fair point again, although I guess that the tabs need not be shown until
> a second term is started.

Yes, I suppose that the UI could work that way: the UI shown
for the first window would look like the non-tab UI.  On the
other hand, this might confuse users.  

Could the tabbed UI be done in such a way that executing
gnome-terminal doesn't necessarily spawn a new program window?  
Specifically, I suppose that when a gnome-terminal is launched, 
it could check to see whether the "tab" option is enabled, then 
check for a currently running gnome-terminal instance.  If so, 
it could send a signal to that program instance to open another 
terminal tab.  Then the second instance of gnome-terminal could 
exit without ever displaying a window.  Perhaps this could be 
done by making most of the program a module that gets loaded if 
a new window needs to be displayed.  Then the "gnome-terminal" 
executable could be a tiny stub program that checks for the 
tab option setting and a pre-existing gnome-terminal process
before loading the more program module and displaying a window.

One cool way "tabbed" and "non-tabbed" mode switching might be 
done would be to have all opened standalone gnome-terminal windows
collapse into a single window when the tabs option is enabled
and the options dialog is closed.  A new gnome-terminal window
would be displayed and then as each of the open gnome-terminal 
windows gets "absorbed" a new would disappear.  The label on 
each terminal's tab could be the text that was displayed on the
standalone window's titlebar.  There might be other good ways
of implementing this mode-switching UI.

The absorbing might be down by passing state information to the
new "tab enabled" process.  The state would consist window text.

One tricky bit would be mode-switching when the separate 
currently running gnome-terminal instances have different 
options selected (text/background colors, transparency,
background image and so on).  I suppose it's doable.  Each
tab display could have separate display characteristics.
That might be a bit confusing from a usability standpoint,
though.

Any other thoughts?

Also, would you care to contact the gnome-terminal developers
with these ideas?

Thanks,
        Miles