Re: Eliminating the xterm
Re: Eliminating the xterm
- Subject: Re: Eliminating the xterm
- From: Bob <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2007 08:41:32 -0700
I'm wondering how removing the X11 dock icon would affect
focus-follows-mouse. This is one of the really nice things about X11.
I can have many X11 apps open at once and can move between them just
moving the mouse. I usually have several windows each of
gnome-terminal, emacs, ggv, and several other open at once and it is
super nice to have this feature. In fact, I rarely use the Mac
Terminal because it lacks this (it can only do focus follow mouse
between Terminal windows).
Second, what about fullscreen mode. I understand it is presently
broken but hopefully will be fixed. When using fullscreen mode it
sort of makes sense to have one X11 dock icon.
Maybe there could be a half-way solution that Ben hinted at,
individual dock icons for X11 app with doc-bundles and not otherwise.
However, this strikes me as getting complicated and error prone.
Bob
On Nov 11, 2007 1:12 AM, Ben Byer <email@hidden> wrote:
>
>
> 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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