Hands-on: new single-window mode makes GIMP less gimpy (ars technica)

Hands-on: new single-window mode makes GIMP less gimpy (ars technica)

The OS X Window handling is better then most anything in Linux, in terms of usability.

If you looked you'd notice that Photoshop in OS X does not use a single master window like it does in Windows. The whole single window mode in the Windows version is mostly just to emulate how window handling is done in Mac OS.

Here is a video taken out of a Photoshop tutorial for illustrative purposes:
http://dr-photoshop.com/zfile/tutorials/wallpaper/oswallpaper.mov

This works out pretty well for OS X because of Apple's use of virtual windows and it's composited desktop.

Each application has it's windows naturally grouped together on it's own virtual desktop. Each desktop is then layered on top of one another. Whenever you click on one portion of a application all the application windows come forward. Also this has the advantage that the application's menus are always located in the same place at the top of the screen. And as you change applications the context changes with it.

This is very intuitive and it is natural enough that most people are able to use OS X without even noticing how the window management works.

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Linux is kinda cursed with the worst and best of both worlds. Mostly worst when it comes to usability.

Linux's desktops tend to get all the windows mixed together like happens with Microsoft Windows. That is if you have 8 browser windows open and you have 8 terminals open then you have to flip through 16 windows all mixed in together to find the one you want.

And when you combine that with the fact that you have 4 desktops and it's very difficult to know what window is on what desktop.. people that tend to use applications with multiple windows or have large numbers of windows can easily get lost and waste a lot of productivity hunting around.

It gets pretty bad sometimes. If your in the middle of a task and your desktop disrupts what your doing then it can take up to 15 minutes to regain your concentration.

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The best way to work around this for people that have lots of applications is to simply get into a habit of ordering their windows the same way every time they use it. Using the virtual desktops in a habitual manner so they simply keep everything memorized.

Of course, that is also why people freak out on Gnome for dropping the session management stuff. They spend a great deal of time setting everything up, but lose it each time they log out.

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The multi-windowed Gimp tries to compensate for this by using 'Window Hinting'. That way it can tell the Window manager that all toolbar and dialog windows are just utility windows for the main window holding your image.

Metacity honors that (as well as a few others) so that when you click on one of Gimp's windows then it brings all of them forward and they are managed as a single unit.

When you alt-tab, for example, your not shuffling through the toolbar, 3-4 dialog windows, and your image window... as well as the half a dozen or so other windows that you happen to have open. You just see one Gimp window and you select all of them at one time.

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Gnome-shell tries to do some rudimentary window grouping and tries to improve the 'intuitiveness' of having multiple virtual desktop. It's a improvement over the status quo, but not up to the same level of usability or naturalness of OS X's window management.

There remains a need to have the ability to application group windows together and have them exist as a unified object.

Think about web browser tabs, for example. They are really just a crutch for poor window management on the part of the OS.

If you are able to group like application windows as a single unit then it would not only make it easier to find and select the window your looking for, but it would make non-conventional window managers like tiling window managers or tab-based window managers much more practical. You could easily do something like select 'tab terminal windows' together and have them all automatically resize and work together. Even in a conventional window manager this would be much easier.

Right now I can manually tile terminals together, but it's tedious and is something that should be handled naturally by the window manager. I've used advanced tiling window managers and have used ratpoison long before that, but those demand a lot of scripting to get things done and tend to be too inflexible for what I want.

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Basically if the Linux desktop did a good job managing application windows as a single entity rather then getting everything all mixed up in one another then the whole Gimp thing would be mute. People simply would not really notice how different it is to manage Gimp while using it versus Krita or Inkscape.

Also you would have people not using tabs in their browsers and would not use tabs in their terminals. They would tend to not understand why tabbing is so nice for certain types of applications.

It would really solve a lot of problems for a lot of people.