I have been too busy with other things to get deeply into the discussions about options and defaults, but it has struck me that the question whether window icons should be sorted according to title or according to creation history interacts with preferences about how workspaces are used and navigated.
It now seems to me that some people use windows within a workspace for the same sort of purpose for which I use workspaces, namely to separate different types of activity. (People using impoverished systems like MSWindows that do not support multiple workspaces -- as far as I know -- have to waste time constantly moving things around on the screen.) I tend to have twelve workspaces, depicted in a 4x3 workspace manager at bottom right. I can cycle rapidly through them using CTRL+Left keys or CTRL+Right. Fortunately ctwm (unlike some stupid window managers) cyles round at either end). Two or three of my workspaces which have (mostly) fixed functions (eg a window used for access to mail, possibly read on several different sites; another used for general purpose web browser windows (each of which may have up to 20, or more tabs); workspaces used (either individuall or in pairs, for some project, e.g. writing a paper viewed in both my text editor (latex source) and a pdf viewer, with perhaps a bibliography manager alongside; or workspaces used for developing or maintaining a software system, with some windows open for editors, or debugging tools and others for interacting with the running package, and a few workspaces used for logins to other machines. In each workspace some of the windows will be open and some closed (invisible, but included in the iconmanager). For most of the windows the labels cannot change, and having them sorted alphabetically in the iconmanager is as useful as any other sorting order, especially if there are not many of them. But a web browser or other tool that supports multiple tabs in one window, only one of which is open at a time, will usually (in all the browsers I have tried) change the browser window title according to which tab is open. In that case if the iconmanager sorts windows alphabetically the ordering of icons keep changing, and therefore the ordering is pretty well useless if you want to go to a window that has a tab that currently isn't open. If you know that that window has a fixed location in the iconmanager finding it is simple. If the location of an icon changes depending on the titles of other windows opened and closed, then finding the required (closed) window requires a systematic search through the windows listed in the iconmanager as well as searching through the tabs in each window. That's what happened to me when the default switched from unordered to ordered and I had not paid attention to the warning that it had been changed. I wasted a lot of time over several days trying to understand why the twenty or so icons in one of my workspaces, kept changing their order randomly. Fortunately the confusion did not last more than a couple of weeks. I then found the source of the problem, restored the unsorted state, by specifying it explicitly in .ctwmrc, and restored my sanity. It is possible that I am the only person on the planet who works in this way (except perhaps the CTWM designer who first set the default to be unsorted, many years ago). Once again, thanks for providing/maintaining the best window manager I have tried to live with. Aaron
