[isabelle-dev] NEWS: Improved management of dockable windows

[Makarius]

On Wed, 21 May 2014, Lars Noschinski wrote:

>  * The fact that a detached window stays on top of the jEdit window
>    is often quite nice.
>
>  * On GNOME 3.8, the detached (and floating instance) windows
>    do not have the usual "close" button, nor can they be maximized
>    (resizing is possible, though) (this refers to b7999893ffcce).
>    This is annoying, as I sometimes use the whole second screen to
>    look at long goals (which are sometimes awkwardly wrapped).
>    (I guess this is a side-effect of making the windows JDialogs).

Such window manager interactions need to be taken as-is, but we can 
collect observations and there might be some workarounds emerging 
eventually.

Swing provides JWindow, JFrame, JDialog, and the differences are unclear. 
My theory is that Sun just comissioned 3 separate teams to work in 3 
different ways with independent windows, and got 3 slightly incoherent 
solutions. I once dared to ask on Stackoverflow, if anybody can explain 
the trio, but I got removed from the "Java" area quite brutally, by some 
thugs with a lot of points.


On Xubuntu 14.04 / Xfce, I see a maximize button, but no iconify button. 
Luckily there is a special window manager menu to apply further 
operations, such as "Roll window up" to approximate iconification.

On Mac OS X, the window always moves with the main one, which looks a bit 
odd, but is better than a window always behind the main one.  The Mac OS X 
window manager is a bit odd anyway.

Windows seems to lack any special tricks, and we probably see the original 
intention of the JDialog team of Sun.


Some weeks ago, the was a local talk by someone who still keeps Smalltalk 
alive (the Pharo project).  In the presentation there was a suggestion to 
bypass all the crappy OS graphics + desktop window management from today, 
and poke directly into the high-end GPUs.  That cannot be the solution to 
that problem.


 	Makarius