On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 07:49:09AM -0400 I heard the voice of [email protected], and lo! it spake thus: > On Sat, 4 Mar 2017 10:56:01 -0600 > "Matthew D. Fuller" <[email protected]> wrote: > > We want something that provides a useful environment for somebody > > just trying it out, and hopefully simultaneously serves as a good > > example config for some of what's possible. Of course, those > > goals are a little contradictory... > > Isn't that a little self explanatory? > Is there some particular thing that I've not noticed that caused you > to write this?
Oh, no, it's not in response to anything you've got; just a general commentary on the goal. > > - Also I'd lean toward RandomPlacement; having to manually choose > > the position of new windows, and having everything blocked until > > you do, would be pretty peculiar to people used to other > > environments. > > I strongly disagree. The reason I like ctwm/fvwm is because they can > place windows where *I* want them instead of directly over top of > the window I'm working on. Quite reasonable. OTOH, we're looking here from a new user perspective. When they sit down for a first try at ctwm, something tries to pop up a window, and the system then just sits there waiting for then to position a wireframe before they can do anything else, what's the reaction? Do they think "This is a sensible thing and exactly what I expected"? That would be great. Do they think "Wow, I didn't expect that, but it's awesome and I didn't even know I wanted it"? Also good. Or are they going to think "WTF is this stupid janky POS doing, and why can't it just pop up the stupid window and let me move on"? I tend to think that if we're getting new users who are concentrating on the default config, they're going to be coming from Windows or MacOS or KDE/Gnome/whatsit, their reaction is going to be strongly biased toward the latter. People from twm or vtwm or the like, may be evenly spread, but they're probably coming in looking at custom config right off, so the default won't matter so much for them. Of course, that said, RP is on the list of things I'm about to flip the default on anyway, so it'll happen at the default config level anyway :) > > - It may be helpful to add some of the standardish key bindings > > I could, but there are sooo many apps that use lots of bindings. I > worry about annoying clashes (blender, the 3D suite, is a big one). Oh, yes, wouldn't want to try going hog-wild. But there are probably a few that are pretty much everywhere; no app in the world is gonna be silly enough to expect control of Alt-F4 :) > f.adoptwindow is an interesting feature. I was originally intended > for testing but think is has a useful function, it would, with a > little work, [...] I think you're significantly overestimating the robustness and capability of captive ctwm's. They are deeply in the realm of "neat demo" and "toy", and have waaay too many weird corners and gotchas and outright flakeouts to get near "useful reliable day-to-day tool"... > > - For the second purpose (documentation of the possible), more > > interspersed comments on some things would be good. > > Actually, I was thinking that lots of comments would make going > through the config painful and duplicate a lot of the man page. Too many, yeah. The world is full of example config files with insanity like 20:1 or 30:1 comment:function ratios. Those are painful. But something like .5:1 or even 1:1 is another story. We'd want people to go to the manual for "what is the precise meaning of this and its implications elsewhere", but I think we want somebody just reading the config without really knowing the syntax to be able to say "I think I understand roughly what this line means". > One, because it's not in the vcs yet [...] Well, why not? That's why we use a distributed one ;) > Two, if I place a header into the config file then when a distro, or > luser, adopts it they can mention their customizations in a specific > place and when the luser submits us a problem with the config then > we can see what happened and why more swiftly. Well, they can certainly do that anyway; I'm not sure the presence of existing VCS-log-lite verbiage really does anything to encourage them to do so if they're not already. If somebody runs into a problem with the config, we really care about and want to see the actual config anyway, not the comments about it. > > probably because that's how twm was setup on an AIX RS/6000 box I > > used back in the 90's that the remote ancestry of much of my > > config comes from. > > Wasn't that King Tut's system? :) A little googling tells me it was probably a POWERstation 220. With the minimum available config, if not less. Though at least it had color graphics; might have even been the full 8-bit. Still, Howard Carter probably considered it too primitive to bother mentioning in his reports :p -- Matthew Fuller (MF4839) | [email protected] Systems/Network Administrator | http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/ On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.
