Customisation

Posted May 21, 2005 21:49 UTC (Sat) by mightyduck (subscriber, #23760) [Link]

Well, that's exactly what kontact is. You can run all of it's components
as standalone applications, kmail, korganizer, kaddressbook, knode,
akregator, and arrange them the way you want. Kontact is just a shell
which combines these applications into a common frame and it was only
developed because of the ongoing crying demand of former outlook-users.
That's also what turns me off about evolution. It's just another (bad
IMHO) outlook-clone and I can't use it's components individually or
replace components with something else.

Posted May 22, 2005 4:03 UTC (Sun) by TwoTimeGrime (guest, #11688) [Link]

> It sounds to me that what you want is not a mega-application that does
> everything, but rather several small apps that each do one task well.

As far as Outlook is concerned, not really. Well, if it were up to me I'd be reading my mail with pine which has been my mail client since about 1992. But we use exchange server at work with pop and imap disabled so I'm out of luck.

What I want is a way to easily rearrange the interface of applications in a manner that suits my working style or current workflow best. If Outlook was split into separate applications then what I'd want (probably from the window manager) is a way to create an empty window and then dock other application windows into the container window. That way I could lay things out how I want but manipulate the "combined app" as it were as a single application. One window to move, one window to iconify or close (which would close all contained applications).

I also don't like using windows (the GUI object). I hate how they overlap. The first thing I do when I run an app is hit the maximize button. Windows are fine for dialog boxes and such but I want use as much of my screen as I can for whatever app I'm working in. There's a window manager called Ion that's thinking along the lines of what I want but you can only control it from the keyboard. It also takes custom programming, in yet another programming language, to get it to work the way you want with apps.

Sadly, my window manager of choice is Microsoft Windows. It does what I want with regards to maximizing and window management. I have Cygwin with its X server running on my Windows laptop. I just ssh into my Linux box, run apps, and have their interface appear on my Windows desktop (gotta love X's ability to do that).

I haven't found anything that works the way the MS window manager does under Linux. There's always a catch with window managers in Linux such as still being able to click and drag the window on the title bar when the window is maximized. MS Windows will lock the window into place when a window is maximized (which is what I want). Or window managers will resize the window to fill the screen but it's just resized, not locked into place, and they still contain window borders which are eating up screen space. That's the primary reason I don't like Macs. They are too window oriented. You spend a lot of time shuffling windows to get to things instead of getting work done.

Posted May 22, 2005 17:08 UTC (Sun) by whitemice (guest, #3748) [Link]

"It sounds to me that what you want is not a mega-application that does everything, but rather several small apps that each do one task well. These can easily be arranged any way you like, and can be individually replaced. Being a long time unix fan, I've never understood the last decade's trend of consolidating more and more tasks into huge applications."

Sigh....

I hear this so often these days I'm tempted to just be rude,

Both Kontact and Evolution are ***NOT*** huge apps, they are VERY UNIX-esque and component oriented. You can open an individual component, have each component open in a seperate (or multiple!) windows. In evolution the backend 'address book' processing is broken out into another process - the evolution-data-server. So it is very easy to write your own front-end using evolution data.

So stop spreading silly nonsense about the big-monolithic-Linux-desktop (either KDE or GNOME). Because in neither case is this true.