On Wed, Jul 7, 2010 at 5:42 PM, Apoorva Sharma <appi2...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Jul 7, 2010, at 6:10 PM, Sam Spilsbury <smspil...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Why exactly do we want the WM to be handling tabs here? Trying to do >> tabbed applications within the window manager for the sake of having >> tabs is a huge waste of memory, especially when the application itself >> can already do tabs. >> > Standardizing a tabbing system would save memory, since individual apps don't > have to manage them, and so unnecessary code could be removed.
No, the removal of code to do internal tabbing has nothing to do with memory wastage. First of all, you are still going to be linking against the GTK or QT libs for any application and have fun getting any of them to remove their tabbing widgets. So that code isn't going to be "saved". Second of all, window managers know nothing about documents, they only know about X11 windows (which are just huge images as far as they are concerned). If you want to "standardize" tabbing into the window manager that is fine, but keep in mind that the window manager has to keep the pixmaps of those windows around at all times in order to tab between them. This in itself is huge memory wastage. If you keep things within the toolkit as they are already done so now, then the toolkit knows about documents and knows what bits of memory it does and doesn't need when switching between documents. In addition, you have /one/ pixmap rather multiple pixmaps. > >> It also does not make sense from a design perspective. the whole point >> of tabbed windows (as it is implemented in both Compiz and KWin) is to >> allow multiple /applications/ to be shoved into one window, >> applications which the user delegates themselves as related. Confusing >> documents and windows here doesn't help at all. > > I agree. However, what do tabs in firfox, chrome, and nautilus do? They allow > one to combine multiple windows into one. Thus, the current tabbing system > used by compiz should be scrapped (at least to me, it provides no benefits by > combining two applications into one window) and there should be a system > where all windows are tabbed into one like Chrome does it. It saves space, > allows apps to use less code, and provides a way to unify tab behavior across > applications. They don't combine multiple windows into one. They combine multiple /documents/ into one. Document != Window. A document just so happens to be the thing you are doing operations on. A window includes that document, but /also/ includes tools to operate on that document, such as cut, copy, paste, toolbars etc. Also if you just want to tab items in a singular application, then why not use the tabs implementation we already have? Toolkits have been able to do this for years, and because applications already use toolkits, the implementation is already consistant! There, no more ugly window manager hacks required. Kind Regards, Sam > > I hope that this alternate description helps. > -- Sam Spilsbury _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana Post to : ayatana@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ayatana More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
