-----Original Message----- From: Steven T. Hatton [mailto:hattons@speakeasy.net] Sent: Wednesday, October 09, 2002 4:09 PM
There *is* one place where a simple generic window bag might be useful. If I tail log files, I can watch in real time what's happening on my servers. I believe this will work for that purpose:
ssh -X root@webserver -f '/usr/X11/bin/xterm -bg black -fg white -hold -e /usr/bin/tail /var/log/httpd/access_log'
If I open a few of these, they become desktop clutter. I'd like to drop them in a window bag that would act as a single window on the desktop with tabs to select the individual xterms.
KDE already comes close to that, right out of the box. If you declare a suitable number of desktops, you can open all those similar windows in just one desktop. When you want to look at them, you just go to that desktop and there's no other visual clutter. Similarly, if the windows are all of the same kind, then they'll all be grouped in one expandable button down in the bottom-of-screen toolbar. It's a little less neat if your "bag" uses several different window types -- two or three gui apps and an Xterm or two. But, there's also a setting somewhere that lets you show desktop toobar buttons for a given app only on the desktop where it lives, or in every desktop. In your case, you might set it for "local desktop only". Then, it's one click to enter the relevant "bag"/desktop, and another click or two to bring the relevant app-window to focus. If I recall, GNOME works similarly (though I haven't seen GNOME 2, yet). Unless there's some additional requirement that you haven't listed, or I've mis-read/overlooked what you did say, then I think you've already got the functionality that you desire, with no additional coding and feature-bloat required. Or not. /kevin