On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 08:09:10AM +0200, Joost Verburg wrote: > Enrico Forestieri wrote: > > Please not. I don't want my screen cluttered with 10 windows if I have > > 10 documents opened at the same time, because I can only work with one > > at the same time. Having the option to have a new window is ok, though. > > They don't have to be on your screen, you can minimize them.
Apart from the fact that a new window consumes more resources, I could say that I don't like to have my task bar cluttered by them ;-) > > Maybe a "Clone Window"? > > Why? Isn't the X button enough? Huh? You were asking for a way to open a new window with the same document loaded in it, or did I get you wrong? > > But a way to create a new instance if so wanted. > > Then please explain me how you will know which window belongs to which > LyX process. If you don't know this difference, you can easily loose > your data by clicking save in the wrong window. But even if there is a > way to identify the different instances you are likely to make this error. I was simply saying that I am ok with this, but I also want the possibility of launching a new instance. I always hate the software that doesn't give any alternative. For example, I could experiment something that can potentially lead to an hard crash and I want to avoid the risk of losing the work I am doing in another LyX window. > Now we have the possibility of multiple windows in a single instance, > there is no need anymore to have multiple instances. Allowing only a > single LyX process will make sure that there is only one version of the > same document in memory (even though you can have multiple views of the > same document), so you will never save the wrong version. As I already said, I have no objection to this being the default behaviour, but I also want to be able to use a switch on the command line letting me launch a new instance. > > This is not aimed at you, Joost, but frankly I am tired with this kind > > of argumentation, which IMO is due to the lobotomization performed by > > Word & Co. > > If we add a "New Window" feature with the same name but totally > different from all major office application, that's not going to make > things more clear for the users. Now I don't get you here. If I use the menu "New Window", I don't expect to have a new instance of LyX. I am talking about a way of externally launch a new instance of LyX. Perhaps I was even going further with respect to what you had in mind. My idea was along these lines: When you invoke lyx, there should be a way to check if another instance is already running, and, if so, pass to it the request of opening a new document (or whatever) in a new window or in a new buffer (this could be selectable by a preference setting). But: there should be a switch telling lyx to not bother checking for an already running instance and always start a new process. This way I can avoid strange situations. For example, I often found that on Windows I cannot kill (for a reason or another) a running instance of a program. Last time this happened to me right with lyx and I traced it to the fact that it was trying to check for the existence of a file I had in lastfiles, but was not able to do so because it was a shared path and I had no internet connection at that point. I was not able to kill it and if your idea was implemented, I should have rebooted in order to launch another instance... Indeed, the damn thing only died after a reboot, but it took more than *ten* minutes to do so! > The most important thing is however that we need to think about all the > results of adding such a new feature. If it becomes possible to have > multiple LyX processes with multiple windows thing become very confusing. Now you are talking with the average Windows user in mind. Windows users are not the only ones. For example, the first time I used powerpoint with two different documents, I was really surprised and upset by the fact that quitting a document window by hitting the X shaped icon in the upper right corner was also quitting the other window. Indeed, I was even more confused, because it was asking me if I wanted to quit the other window which had unsaved changes. Damn'd thing, I thought, I was not asking you to quit the other window. Then I understood what that other X shaped icon in an inner corner was meaning. So, there are users and users. Some will be confused, others will not. Please, can we stop using the average Windows user as the unit of measure? -- Enrico
