Call to arms! A new GUI for Linux

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sat, Oct 16, 2004 at 11:03:12PM -0400, Anton Markov wrote:
[snip]
> How can we talk about a unified interface when basic drag 'n' drop of
> text doesn't work properly between QT and GTK, the "busy" icon which is
> supposed to show when an application stops loading (Application Startup
> Notification) does not work properly, or opening images from Konqueror
> in The Gimp causes multiple instances of The Gimp to open. I am sure the
> list can go on.

So all applications should support finding an instance of themselves and
adding the passed file as a new document rather than launching a new
copy of the program?  What if that isn't what the user wants?

> The point is that icons can be turned off, one can place a shortcut bar
> at the top of the screen with configurable keyboard shortcuts, there is
> Klipper for the "global clipboard", and some distributions already ship
> with a graphical bootup screen. Keyboard shortcuts are also
> configurable, and a tab-based window manager can also be developed on
> top of the current infrastructure.
> 
> The real problem lies in the _system-wide_ contact list, _universal_
> application drawers, and other _system-wide_ features. If all
> applications exported meta-data such as supported file types,
> description, interface, etc. through a DCOP-like interface, it would
> possible to create a global "recent documents" list that can be filtered
> for each specific application (if I understand your ideas right). As for
> keyboard shortcuts, we need a real UI designer to sit down and draw up a
> set of specifications, and for both KDE and GNOME people to follow it.

And in which language should the keyboard shortcuts make sense?

> Unfortunately non of this will happen with the current mind-set of
> choice = 10 different email clients, unless all of those ten project
> leaders will agree on the same set of keyboard shortcuts and APIs. A
> unification of QT and GTK2, with a good wxWindows interface would go a
> long way. It would also free up a ton of developers to work on other
> (although perhaps less interesting problems).

Similar problem.  What if they have different features, how do you make
keyboard shortcuts make sense for all features for all programs in all
languages?

> It would be best to let the user group the files according to global
> pieces of metadata (including parent application, a.k.a. filetype).
> 
> Another good feature would be a global CVS-like system built into the
> implementation-independent filesystem code, which would keep track of
> which applications opened each file and a Changelog of the application's
> actions. For example, if you create an SVG in Sodipodi and then touch it
> up in The Gimp and convert to a PNG, you could go back, make a change to
> the SVG in Sodipodi, and The Gimp will know how to re-apply your
> touch-ups to update the final PNG.

Part of what I have always liked about unix/linux systems is that each
tool tends to do one thing, but does it very very well.  Integration of
too many features and tieing programs directly together tends to add
feature creep, introduce complexities to the coding and usually a ton
more bugs.  I want simple programs that do their particular job well,
and if you can control them entirely from commandline/script then it's
perfect since I can simply script those steps I want the gimp to do to
the sodipodi file and repeat it on any input file (or input file change)
that I want, which is to me MUCH better than having the programs talk to
each other and discuss changes and such.  It sounds like you want to do
between applications what current high end CAD systems do internally for
their geometry data (everything is a tree structure of dependant
variables, and relative specifications where if you change the size of
something, everything made dependant on that size will update).  Very
complex to implement well, and doing it between applications sounds even
more tricky and probably not worthwhile.

> Well, that's my 2 cents (well, maybe 20). Comments welcome.

Well mine are probably only worth an extra $0.01.

Lennart Sorensen
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