D23415: Improve comprehensibility and consistency of window placement mode names

[Noah Davis]

ndavis added a comment.


  In D23415#519005 <https://phabricator.kde.org/D23415#519005>, @zzag wrote:
  
  > I'm against renaming "smart" placement policy for couple reasons:
  >  (a) it's been called like this since its inception <https://github.com/KDE/kde-workspace/commit/3688839f2abac2996530b012a493afcbf86ee640>, i.e. starting from late 1999
  >  (b) "smart" is a catchy name, which is easy to memorize
  
  
  Catchiness is important if you're going to use it for marketing, but you never see KDE promoting the smart placement feature and people on forums rarely talk about it. Just because it has been a bad name since 1999, doesn't mean it should continue to be bad for another 20 years.
  
  >> How should anyone know what that really means? How is "Smart" actually smart?
  > 
  > I'd say if something is capable of doing taxes, then we can consider it to be "smart." However, this placement policy is called "smart" because "a really smart placement algorithm" decides how to place clients.
  
  If someone doesn't like that it usually places windows far away from where the mouse is, does that make it less smart than "Under Mouse"? No, but what makes a placement algorithm good is subjective. If a program does your taxes for you and does it correctly, then "smart" is not so subjective.
  
  >> "Smart" is meaningless and must be replaced.
  > 
  > It's cool when the name of a thing precisely reflects what it is. However in this case, we'll keep the name for historical reasons.
  > 
  > Naming things is a can of worms. For example, "Linux" is meaningless in context of a kernel.
  
  For a project, a meaningless name isn't necessarily bad. Linux only means what Linux is, which actually makes it easier to find it in search engines. Features are a different matter. This is not a feature that people talk about all the time, so I don't think history is a good reason for keeping a name. Naming is pretty easy in this case: call it what it does.

REPOSITORY
  R108 KWin

BRANCH
  better-window-placement-text (branched from master)

REVISION DETAIL
  https://phabricator.kde.org/D23415

To: ngraham, #kwin, #vdg, ndavis, filipf
Cc: cfeck, filipf, zzag, ndavis, kwin, kde-doc-english, LeGast00n, The-Feren-OS-Dev, sbergeron, jraleigh, gennad, fbampaloukas, GB_2, mkulinski, ragreen, jackyalcine, Pitel, iodelay, crozbo, bwowk, ZrenBot, ngraham, alexeymin, skadinna, himcesjf, lesliezhai, ali-mohamed, hardening, romangg, jensreuterberg, abetts, sebas, apol, mart
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