more experiments with Ion
Ok, I think I’m now sold on the Ion approach to window management. It isn’t all flowers and puppies, but at the Mutt folks say “… it sucks less”.
The good points
- Centralized Alerts from urgent windows - this is just bloody brilliant, and so freaking useful
- Full usage of screen real estate - very handy
- Dock App support (so I can keep my HUD as it was in AfterStep)
- Query interface that always has focus
The bad points
- No xft support. I really got used to antialiased title bars in AfterStep, it’s a bit ugly to go back
- Still on the learning curve for how to really use it
- The Linear workspace layout is still not entirely intuitive to me, after years doing 2D pagers. I’d like a Pager with (you are here)
All in all, a pretty big win. About an hour of hacking put Urgent support hints into the last application I needed it for, which makes it so much nicer for this environment. I just also got frame renaming bound correctly, so my gaim windows are getting shoved into the right places, very nice.
I’ll end up building Mandriva packages for the latest code this weekend, including some ion startup bits to make it easy to launch items on start up from kdm. All in all, a good experiment for the evenings of this week.
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