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Window mismanagement page 1

The first myth of window management is that it exists…


The window manager has to keep track of the shape of every window on the screen. But certain Appearance themes for Mac OS classic such as Glass mess up the window shape, such that dragging a window drags other parts of the screen around with it:

Window managers should also know what windows look like, as it’s their job. So for example it should not be possible to wind up with a title bar the size of the screen:

At any one time, there should be one and only one active window on the screen (excluding palette windows), or two if you have a parent-child relationship. The window manager should understand and control this, and glitches like the following should be completely impossible:

A window manager should also have proper layering support to deal with the various layers of windows that occur. For example, core windows, then menus, then dialog boxes and finally tooltips for that application. But this never seems to work in Explorer:

Local tooltips should never be visible on top of other applications’ windows:

And applications should never be able to obscure global tooltips even if they are always-on-top (as tooltips are more important):

Creation of new windows should not suddenly cover up whatever you were doing:

and windows of programs that are not responding should not keep resurfacing like zombies out of the grave: