tabs and frames
By anders pearson 27 Nov 2001
i mentioned in my diary a while back that i’ve started using ion as my window manager on my work machine.
<p>take a minute and go look at the ion site and look at the screenshots.</p>
<p>ion uses an entirely different approach to the <span class="caps">GUI</span> than your standard mac/windows/gnome/kde interface. everything is based on frames and tabs rather than windows. windows don’t really exist. you can’t have apps stacked partially on top of each other in ion. far from being a limitation, i’ve found this to be a serious improvement. it meshes particularly well with the tabbed browsing of mozilla and <a href="http://galeon.sourceforge.net/">galeon</a> (mozilla’s support for tabbed browsing still has a long way to go but galeon is a dream). with ion, i spend no time at all moving windows around and trying to find the right app or browser window. furthermore, the frames + tabs approach lends itself to much more efficient keyboard shortcuts than traditional <span class="caps">GUI</span>s which also tends to make it faster to use. no matter where i am, i know that with my desktop setup i can hit ‘alt-f1’ and see my email, ‘alt-F2’ and have my browser in front of me or ‘alt-f3’ and have emacs up. no alt-tabbing through the 15 browser windows i have open at any given time searching for the icon that corresponds to my ssh session to the email server. it’s just right there; the shortcut is already hard-wired into my brain so i don’t have to think about it anymore.</p>
<p>to get the most from ion, you really have to take the time to learn all the keyboard shortcuts and to experiment and customize your setup to the way you work (you can customize pretty much anything about ion by editting one or two config files (even more if you’re comfortable writing a shell script or two)). expect this process to take a few days.</p>
<p>since ion is still under development, it’s fair to say that it still has room to grow. right now, if you want support for “sticky” apps (ones that stay on screen in the same place no matter what; such as an icq client, clock, or system monitors), you have to apply a <a href="http://rt.fm/ion/archive/2001-11/0051.html">patch</a> to the source yourself and recompile. </p>
<p>you also run into the problem that there are a few apps (such as <a href="http://www.gimp.org/">the gimp</a>) that make assumptions about how the window manager behaves that turn out to be false with ion. eg, the gimp uses a different window for each palette and toolbar which turns into a mess of tabs in ion and some image viewing apps don’t know how to handle it when their “window” is resized to fit a frame in ion, stretching the image incorrectly. the workaround for these kinds of problems is to use <a href="http://www.xfree86.org/4.1.0/Xnest.1.html">Xnest</a> to run a seperate X session inside a frame and then run a lightweight but more traditional style window manager (<a href="http://blackbox.alug.org/">blackbox</a> is my favorite of those</a>) on it to handle these rogue apps.</p>
<p>ion certainly isn’t for everyone (“you mean you actually have to <em>learn</em> something to use it?”) but it’s a good example of how interfaces can sometimes be improved by throwing away old, broken metaphors like “windows” and “desktops” (these are fine if you’re doing office type tasks on the computer but are pretty meaningless for what i do all day).</p> Tags: ui design x window managers ion blackbox