CLosing apps

[Matthew Woehlke]

Maciej Pilichowski wrote:
> Let's start over:
> 
> F44 -- close _this_ app (one instance)
> F45 -- close doc

Drop "F44"? I'm not sure I'm convinced of the need for anything along 
the lines of "close all windows of the same type in a container".

(It also occurred to me that we already have containers of a sort in the 
form of virtual desktops... so some arguments about how to do things can 
be applied also to windows on different desktops.)

> The other solution would be providing F43 which would mean -- close 
> entire container. If there is no container (parent=desktop) close the 
> current app (behave like F44) (*). This would keep consistent UI at 
> cost of breaking compatibility.

Mouse-wise, I'm operating on the assumption you will be able to close a 
window, or any ancestor container. I'd imagine we'd keep alt-f4 as some 
form of 'close container'; the question is, do you close the topmost 
container, or the nearest parent container?

> (*) we can treat every window as container, just SDI would be GAI 
> container with no visual indicator and with only one app inside. If 
> we agree that closing last app should close container it would be 
> also more consistent.

I won't mention technical standpoints :-), but as far as "how does X 
behave", I agree that things operating on containers should treat a 
top-level (i.e. direct child of root) window as a "container" for such 
purposes.

> PS. I think closing all instances of selected app is dangerous and 
> confusing. But this is off-topic :-)

Yes, but some apps already provide it, and it /can/ be useful (though, 
mostly for annoying applications that refuse to run multi-process and/or 
break on updates... Firefox and OOo are examples of both). I could also 
turn around and argue that it's only useful as a work-around for bugs or 
design flaws, and thus shouldn't exist :-).

-- 
Matthew
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