The Waning of the Overlapping Window Paradigm?

Bingo Foo asks: "The paradigm of movable, overlapping windows on the desktop has been around, and indeed dominant, for a long time. The original motivation for this was to mimic sheets of paper on a desktop. This is a useful metaphor, but may be a bit limiting given the capacity a computer has for automation of the layout and display of "desktop" objects. Lately, I have been pleased to see an increase in 'framing,' 'docking,' 'stacking,' and 'tabbing' being used, starting most conspicuously with frames in the web. More significantly, it has shown up as an application workspace paradigm that improved previously crappy MDI implementations in programs like Visual Studio and KDevelop. In my opinion, the most promising experimental application, even if still immature, is one of the neatest window managers around, ion. Does anyone else see a time when movable, tear-off docking and automated full-time tiling completely take over from the free-floating manually arranged desktops of today?"

Comments

Re:Xerox did not have it

[Simon Brooke]

Actually, I believe that Xerox did NOT have overlapping windows, it only appeared to.

Then you believe wrong.

I personally used Xerox 1108 ('Dandelion') and 1186 ('Daybreak') machines from 1984 until 1988. They definitely, without question or possibility of doubt, had multiple overlapping windows, and, indeed, all the features of a modern WIMP environment. Xerox Stars, Dolphins, Dorados, Dandetigers and a number of other Xerox machines (including the Smalltalk ones whose model designations I've forgotten) had multiple overlapping windows at least as far back as 1978. It's probable (but I don't know this for a fact because I never saw one) that the Alto also had multiple overlapping windows, at least in it's Smalltalk mode.

Re:Maybe I'm just stubborn

[nickjennings]

Man, I think alot of people posting here have no idea what Ion is really like. You *can* overlap windows in Ion. You just design the frameset for them. For example:

I have a left frame that is the height of two xterms stacked, this is god for programming, on the right, I have two seperate frames each the size of an xterm (one long frame on left, two regular sized frames on right).

in each of these frames I can have as many xterms as I want (or any other type of program). To move between frames, I use Alt-, to cycle through the xterms in that frame I use Alt-tab.

On the bottom, I have a very short frame that is as wide as the entire screen, this is great for log files, and I can easily switch between them.