• Registered: 2009-05-28
  • Posts: 244

Topic: tabbed window manager

A bit of a ramble I'm afraid, skip now if you don't have 5 minutes to waste.

I've been playing with the uzbl web browser, which is webkit based, and has no interface.  I mean, it opens up a web page specified on the command line, and displays the page.  no tabs, no url field, no forward/back buttons.  It's not quite as pure as that, since it includes a keyboard interface, but whatever.  All of the interface is supposed to be provided by separate, external tools.  It's a great aesthetic idea, single function purity, of the same kind that inspired the original unix commands, or ibm's VM, etc.
But anyway, I want multiple pages open at a time.  And tabs are a fairly efficient use of screen space.

But to me, each and every application re-implimenting it's own private tabbing system is just nuts.  Tabs should be supported in the window manager.  So I got all excited about this "new" idea, etc, but of course it's already been done, under the name of "tabbed frames", eg here: http://modeemi.fi/~tuomov/ion/pwm.html

I'd really like to play around with the idea, can any of the modern WMs do tabbed frames?  Openbox?

  • Registered: 2009-05-28
  • Posts: 244

Re: tabbed window manager

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison … w_managers

OK, several support this., eg fluxbox, but not openbox.
In fact the feature is well-known enough to be a column heading in the "WM features table" above.  Perhaps I've been living under a rock the last few years.

Last edited by jackbang (2009-06-15 00:52:01)

  • Registered: 2009-05-28
  • Posts: 244

Re: tabbed window manager

compiz also includes this, sort of, with window grouping and tabbing.  Very slick looking, with iphone-style 3d rotating transitions between "tabs", but it is actually yet another layer on top of the window manager, so 3 levels of control - application, window manager, compositor. 2 too many.

Here's more the idea:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/1306/

  • Registered: 2009-05-28
  • Posts: 244

Re: tabbed window manager

I guess workspaces kind of act like MDI windows, where the "window" that comprises each workspace is the entire desktop.
All this to navigate between contexts, and manage their display on limited screen space.  It's all a bit of a mess to my purist mind, there must be a better way.

  • omns
  • #! Die-hard
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  • Registered: 2008-11-25
  • Posts: 4,406

Re: tabbed window manager

Have you had a look at pekwm?

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  • Registered: 2009-05-28
  • Posts: 244

Re: tabbed window manager

Thanks, I'll take a look.

Further to my rambling, I think some of the window managers use tags instead of workspaces, ie you give each window a set of tags, and then you can construct a "workspace" by selecting a set of tags.  This seems better than workspaces in some ways, but shifts the navigation metaphor from purely spacial, to an abstract topic-based organization.  And what if all your "projectX" tagged windows don't fit on the screen?  You then have to have spacial "workspaces" in addition to tag selection.  The issues of multiplexing the screen, and selecting a context (set of related apps/documents, etc) are two separate concerns.

This idea seems interesting:  http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/15672/  ie you should be able to "snap" windows together.  compiz provides something like this with window grouping - except it doesn't "snap" them together in a tiled layout.

In fact a tiling layout window manager is doing much the same work as application toolkits.  Writing apps, you always have menubar widgets, panels, canvases, and so on, that you "pack" into a layout of some kind.  Perhaps all of this is actually rightly the job of the window manager, and applications should submit a "layout specification" for the VM to layout all it's widget windows, but the layout is ultimately overridable by the user.  Why on earth should applications have to individually code the ability to show toolbars at the top, bottom, sides, floating, collapsing toolbars, etc, etc (albeit this detail is handled by the application toolkit in many cases).  And what about having the menu-bar at the bottom of the window?  Or separated from the main app window, fixed to the top of the scrreen - ie apple style.  None of the app-toolkitsd let you do that, AFAIK.  This could all be easy to do  if the entire layout was the job of the window manager, instead of the current two-level system, where widget layout within a window is done by the application, and usually hard-coded, and layout of application windows done by the WM.

I said I was rambling.

Last edited by jackbang (2009-06-15 07:24:52)

  • Nicky
  • #! CrunchBanger
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  • From: Paris (France)
  • Registered: 2009-04-05
  • Posts: 163

Re: tabbed window manager

I mark this page to come later, the discussion about uzbl and it possible interface interrest me big_smile

  • Registered: 2009-05-28
  • Posts: 244

Re: tabbed window manager

forget openbox, metacity, et al.

Just tried out the DWM install that comes with crunchbang (posting this from it in fact), and wow.  Back to basics for sure, but what productivity.  I just grabbed pekwm and wmii window manages, and compiling them up, including googling for errors that the pekwm configure threw up (need to apt-get install libxext-dev), all in the space of minutes.  Well maybe it would have been just as quick under gnome, but just feels much more direct.
DWM uses tags for windows, but it kind of uses them very much in a spacial manner - ie there are only 9 tags, which are by default shown in the same way a workspace manager would show them in a panel - I was kind of expecting user-defined tags, which you could select by typing the tag name or whatever, but in fact the DWM way is so quick.  And all from the keyboard. fantastic.

tagging and tiling - definitely something to think about re: uzbl multi-page management.

EDIT: pekwm is actually in the ubuntu repositories (no need to waste, oh, 5 minutes, compiling from source), and a good HOWTO in the forum here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=662204

Last edited by jackbang (2009-06-15 15:12:13)

  • Registered: 2009-05-28
  • Posts: 244

Re: tabbed window manager

There's now script to make the uzbl browser tabbed: http://www.uzbl.org/wiki/uzbl_tabbed

The way this works is the app opens a window containing a GTK notebook container, and then opens the uzbl instance in each notebook page.  I didn't know you could do that with GTK, or maybe its a python/GTK feature - very neat in any case.   Perhaps in theory the same "notebook-wrapper" python app could have arbitrary applications run in each tab?  I guess it captures the window the sub-app creates.  Or maybe intercepts GTK calls.  Aactually, I can't envisage exactly how it works.  I think I'll have a play.

Last edited by jackbang (2009-06-24 06:55:04)

  • Registered: 2009-05-28
  • Posts: 244

Re: tabbed window manager

Nope, arbitrary apps don't work.

The answer is gtkPlug, which lets conforming apps be embedded in other gtk apps:
http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/unst … kPlug.html

It's been over a week since I got the latest uzbl source, so I guess they've added gtkPlug support since - things are moving fast.

One thing crunchbang excels at is helping you (me) discover and learn.

  • semko
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  • From: Bosnia and Herzegovina
  • Registered: 2008-12-04
  • Posts: 96

Re: tabbed window manager

What about this:
http://urukrama.wordpress.com/2008/07/2 … d-desktop/
smile

Truth is on the side of the oppressed.
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