Re: Are title-bars/tabs necessary? (was Re: Possible? Toggle statusbar)

> The main problem usually is that *terminals*
> (which are the majority of client windows on my system) don't
> really tell you in the the window title what you were busy with on them...
> although probably this is a problem that could be solved. Any good
> suggestions on a "better" management without title bars are welcome. :)

I don't think this can be solved. Some programs do think about you and
print their status on the term's titlebar, such as Gentoo's "emerge"
command. This is made by the guys who code their app, you can't ask
for every console program and script to do that.

This is just like asking every graphical app developer to follow ICCCM
and to set the 'role' winprop cleverly so that you could organize them
well in ion. I especially think of IM programs and their chat windows,
which is one of the things I tried to automagically tidy in my ion3.


I am not on an unix right now and I can't test what I'm about to say,
but even if I'm not right on every point, I'm positive at least some
of them are true :

For a console app, what you could do would recode the term (that's
without me, pal) to print on its titlebar either the program in action
or the pwd when not told otherwise. That could help, but I'm sure
you'll find cases in which this is still not the perfect solution.

For example, when executing a shellscript, maybe you want to print
only the name or $0, or every arg. Perhaps you want it to describe
changes to the cwd, and every command it's using, perhaps not.

And you may not want anything to change your terminal window's title,
so you can do funky stuff with ion and not having to bother to write a
cleverest parsing in Lua to recognize your original window.

-- 
Sylvain Abelard,
Railer Rubyist. Epita MTI 2008.