What's wrong with MDI?

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What's wrong with MDI?
by Jörgen S on Sunday 10/Jun/2001, @21:39

Most of the posts here are quite negative towards MDI. Why is that? I think it is probably the best "invention" yet.

I hate being able to view just one editor pane at once. So, please, keep the MDI-stuff in Gideon. At least as an option, that would make me happy. (Window splitters aren't that bad either, so keep them too. ;)

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Re: What's wrong with MDI?
by Carbon on Monday 11/Jun/2001, @00:10

Window-in-window MDI is a pretty flamewar-magnetized issue, mainly because most newbies are confused by it. This is something I can attest to personally, as I've seen time and time again people wondering why, when they minimize their document windows in M$ Orifice, they can't find them on the taskbar to restore them.

Also, it's important to note that MDI does not neccesarialy imply window-in-window. There are other mehods, like the frame splitters you mentioned, also konsole style where you can have several documents, but only view one, and also tabbed style, plus probably many others I've never heard of.

I'd be more inclined to go for an enchanced frame style, where you don't lose any window space for documents, and that still makes it easy to organize frames.

Also, what would really be nice is the kicker taskbar menus that were recently implemented (another article on the Dot talks about this, can someone provide a link?). How about a list of MDI documents in each window displayed on the menu of any MDI app, as well as the system currently in place just for KDE-noncompat or SDI apps?

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Re: What's wrong with MDI?
by Sangohn Christian on Monday 11/Jun/2001, @05:46

Absolutely!!!

Grats to the Whole KDevelop team!

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Re: What's wrong with MDI?
by Thorsten Schnebeck on Monday 11/Jun/2001, @13:32

MDI is a word with different definitions. Often its interpreted as a handling of multiple docs in a way you can see since Win3.1 and MS-Office. Others called tabbed views, docked windows or embedded docs MDI, they are right, too - all this is a kind of a M_ultiple D_ocument I_nterface.
My personal friend (*ironic*) is the first MDI-paradigma. I think windows in window (win-in-win) does not fit in a virtual desktop system like x-windows, here KDE. Here we don't have a single desktop like M$-Win, we are used to organize our work on many screens and are used to have a powerful global taskbar/pager to navigate. The (I call it) classic MDI does not fit this X paradigma. The win-in-win-problems can you see also with current KOffice-KPart: in an extra windows I could edit much better, than now in an active KOffice-KPart. Another problem is the using of classic MDI-windows as application toolbox. This does not work well as KPart, too. You are not able to use this toolbox outside the KPart-frame (see: krayon-frame in kword)

On the other hand, there are realy good examples of intelligent MDI: Konqi split-views, KDevelop-1.4-CVS (very flexible: tab-view, tear-off and of course classic MDI), Konsole (easy but useful), Kate fast file selector and so on. But PLEASE, don't use classic MDI.

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