Re: Eliminating the xterm
Re: Eliminating the xterm
- Subject: Re: Eliminating the xterm
- From: Ben Byer <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2007 00:12:29 -0800
On Nov 10, 2007, at 1:09 PM, Jeremy Huddleston wrote:
I agree - X isn't an 'Application' per se, so much as a means of
running applications. Personally I think a better UI solution might
be
to set LSUIElement to true, and not have X11 appear in the Dock at
all. Instead, perhaps a MenuBar item, where we could get basic
feedback to see if the X server is running (light grey == not
launched, dark grey == running) and have the shortcut menu to X
applications and settings available by clicking the icon. Am I alone
in thinking this might be a more consistent interface?
I don't think eliminating X11 from the dock completely is a good
idea... especially since we should have SOME dock item to represent
these windows.
I do, however, like the idea of the menu bar item... it sounds a bit
like the way OS9 Classic worked on OSX before leopard.
While X is not running, the greyed-out menubar icon could give the
X11 Applications menu to allow users to pick an application to run.
That would eliminate the double X11 icon issue in the dock since
people would not need to keep /A/U/X11.app around. I don't have
experience with Menu Bar icons, but I imagine it could be done
without even touching xserver or quartz-wm.
Another option to consider would be to create ~/Applications/X11/
*.app for each item in the Applications menu. This would allow the
user to launch any of the Applications in that menu from the dock
but still wouldn't "feel right" since the windows would be in X11
rather than the launcher (which is the case right now for /A/U/
X11.app anyways). We could probably make this "feel right" by doing
some kind of clever communication between Xquartz/quartz-wm and the
launcher to allow the launcher to keep track of what window IDs it
spawned and have subsequent clicks on the launcher raise those
windows. Additionally, closing those windows would require a signal
from quartz-wm/Xquartz back to the launcer to exit. This has some
usability concerns though. While it might work great for something
like gimp or OpenOffice, it doesn't work so well with multiple xterm
windows.
Another idea we threw around was having X11.app only appear as a
System Prefs panel, and having the rest of it be seamless. I like the
idea of a Menu Extra too.
However, we would then have to have Dock Icons for each individual
app. (And even if you don't care about seeing them in the Dock, those
same icons are used in the Alt^H^H^HCmd-Tab switcher, too.) When I
asked some coworkers about this, they said that the only way to do
this would be to do exactly what you suggest -- dynamically create
fake "proxy" .app bundles for each app. This is exactly how VMWare
Fusion, Parallels Desktop, CodeWeavers Crossover, and (IIRC) the
Printer drivers do this, and ... it makes me feel a little dirty even
thinking about it.
These same coworkers (who are undoubtedly reading this) suggested that
it would be better to make it easier for people to make .app bundles
that ran X applications -- for example, Gimp.app. The launchd support
actually makes that easier, except for the part where it broke almost
all of the ones that people had already made. This, however, doesn't
work for other apps, so we might still need an X11 dock icon. As
always, I'm open to ideas.
--
Ben Byer
CoreOS / BSD Technology Group, XDarwin maintainer
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