
One Night in Rio: Vacation Photos from Plan9 - crazyloglad
https://arcan-fe.com/2017/04/17/one-night-in-rio-vacation-photos-from-plan9/
======
erikpukinskis
All window systems suck because of premature encapsulation.

The idea that software could lay out two pieces of content without any access
to the semantics of that content is flawed.

We won't improve on the Macintosh until we break the window/windower
encapsulation. A window manager needs to provide an API for windows to see
virtual reality around them and move through it.

~~~
bmillare
Can you expand on this idea or provide examples and how it solves problems
with the old model? What current UI system better models the concept you are
talking about? Do web pages do this better?

~~~
erikpukinskis
Sure, hypertext/wikis are used for window management quite often. Also, news
feeds are quite common. Wikis are good for treelike content structures, and
news feeds are good for serialized content.

------
bnolsen
wireframe resize and move is the easy answer for reducing application resize
events and display server spamming. This is a core problem I've always had
with enlightenment window manager, it forces opaque resize/move no matter what
which murders remote display usage.

~~~
jhbadger
Of course when Enlightenment first came out, the opaque treatment of windows
was a fairly new thing (I think BeOS was where that originated). At the time
wireframe window movement was the standard -- on X, on the Mac, and on
Microsoft Windows.

~~~
barrkel
Windows NT had full blitting of windows while moving them instead of xored
wireframe - it was the single easiest way of distinguishing between it and
Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. That was in 93/94 - I don't know how it compared
with Be of that era, but Wikipedia says the first developer release wasn't
until late 95.

