On Sun, 2005-01-09 at 01:19, Matthew Miller wrote: > On Sun, Jan 09, 2005 at 12:56:25AM -0600, Les Mikesell wrote: > > My menu items have nothing to do with windows - they start > > programs that live in filesystem folders. I see no reason > > why that should be hidden from you. Or why starting the > > same program should be different depending on which > > window manager you are running today. > > Why should I have to worry about which folder a program I want to run is > stored in? All I want to do is start the program -- I don't care about its > on-disk layout. What do you do when you have just installed or downloaded a new program that your menu doesn't include? Window managers that launch programs from the filesystem normally recognize a launcher file that specifies an icon, the location of the program to start and a few other options so you manipulate these and/or symlinks in the filesystem for the layout you want to see instead of traversing to the real program location (which in fact might be an ssh command to start the program on a different machine...). You can, for example, drag items off the gnome menu and drop them in the filesystem, creating whatever layout you want. Then you can run KDE or icewm (and probably others) and be able traverse the same layout, launching the same programs in the same way. I'd guess that window managers that don't have a built-in view of the desktop could run a file manager that understands the launchers which might be even more sensible in a purist sense. If a bunch of people need access to the same set of programs you can make a folder of launchers somewhere and drop symlinks to it on the desktop of those who need it. I don't understand window managers very well so maybe I've just missed it, but I haven't found any other reasonable mechanism to give different groups of people access to different sets of programs, especially if they don't all use the same WM. I'm not sure there is a decent way even if they do. > When I start a program, (generally) a window pops up. So > starting a program _does_ have something logical to do with windows. Yes, but the menu only relates to starting the program. You could have started it from the command line or any other way and it would still open the window. > But the more important point in response to your earlier post is: there's > nothing particularly universal about your suggested paradigm. Not all > windowing environments (I assume we're not really talking strictly about > "window managers") normally have the concept of "icons on the desktop or in > folders". Some very nice ones, in fact, don't do that. Sure, you can run a > file manager/browser app that may have that feature -- just like you could > run a menu/launger panel. No argument on that point. If developers would get together and use one set of shared libraries instead of locking each other out with anti-competitive licenses it would make sense for the WM to always include those operations. Until then (likely forever...) it makes sense to have a choice of several bloated but handy WM/desktop environments and lean/fast WM-only options. The latter would let the filemanager do all the launching instead of duplicating the code. So, that leaves the problem: how do you install a new program and make it visible to some arbitrary set of users? Or what I'd consider a more typical case: how do you make a few dozen different arrangements visible to the appropriate members of a few hundred users, some of whom should see combinations or all of the individual subsets. -- Les Mikesell les@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx