On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 5:10 AM, Gabriel Pettier <gabriel.pett...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'd love too, to have such an option, that works reliably, that's why i use > suspend whenever i can, and i hate when i get a unity crash or something, > all my windows on all workspaces are lost/messed up, it's a pain, i want > something that doesn't make me think too. > > i'm not sure it can even work with the internal state of applications (a > terminal with vim inside? A thunderbird with an half-written email? ditto > for libreoffice?). > > But i would really love that kind of thing, i just don't think it's possible > to get correct.
"Correct" is a luxury of the gods and mathematicians. I'll accept decreasing error. Yes, the free software community has never reached a conclusion on how window positions should be saved. Part of this is an inherited messed up notion of what the window manager should do. (Hint: less.) Terminals are tricky, and I confess I don't understand how they interact with X11 well enough to say much about them. One snafu that we have is that we talk about terminals themselves instead of what you can do in a terminal. Most of the time when I'm running a terminal, the program I want is the shell that runs in it; the terminal program itself is an implementation detail. I imagine it would be confusing to people now if we highlighting the terminal in the GUI and instead highlighted the shells, but I don't think the confusion would last long; if I remember correctly, that's what CDE did 15 years ago. Maybe thinking about it that way helps someone find a solution. One thing that is possible approaching correctness is to restart terminals with the shell and what was the working directory restored. Thunderbird, or any mail client, should be able to save drafts. Yes, somebody may have to change the code to make it behave. Same for LibreOffice. I mentioned it before and again at the start of this thread: OS/2 work area folders are a session restore mechanism. They are more fine grained than anything being used today, and at least seem to take advantage of recursion: If the desktop is a work area, then anything on it (or "in it", when you recognize it as a special folder) that was open the moment before shutdown should be reopened. If a work area folder on the desktop was open, it's reopened, and it in turn reopens the things in it that were open. By driving the system through folders, providing work area folders, and focusing on the data that people work on instead of the applications they use to do that work, you solve most session restoration woes. There are still people who want to start apps and load files into them, instead of just opening files. In some of those cases there is a file that provides a hook into session management, like a project file listing the files in the project. (It's a "hook" that you might use to reel in a solution.) Other cases are harder. Some programs, like the calculator, don't usually have any sort of file representation that can be useful. There are for these the binaries themselves, .desktop files, loading scripts, treating the dash somehow as a work area folder, and somehow the same old session mechanism that there was some years ago. Part of what horrified my about the session handling page was the low aim. I'm sure to some people that's called "being realistic". Call me Don Quixote. I realized while writing this that I wrote something that might be taken the wrong way: "Writing a desktop environment is a cheap hobby that will last a long time." I meant that it's MY cheap hobby, one that I've worked on here and there for a long time, mostly in design ideas and very little code. One guy who types slowly (~40wpm) trying to write a desktop environment (toolkit, wm, everything) on the weekends will be at it for a long time. I already have the computer and the Internet connection; I don't need power tools, scopes, or much of a physical workspace for it. -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~unity-design Post to : unity-design@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~unity-design More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
