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Comment by badsectoracula

4 days ago

> I have a perfectly good window manager; why does every app need its own incompatible, usually inferior window manager built in?

Because some applications do need multiple windows in the same application context. A common example would be image editors.

It is unfortunate that almost all generic MDI implementations (Win32 and Qt basically) are incredibly barebones. I want to have multiple windows visible when i'm using Krita, for example, but Qt's MDI support (that Krita does use) is worse than what Windows 95 had.

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badsectoracula

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Twey  3 days ago

The ‘application context’ isn't a concept that adds value, at least for the applications I've seen. For things where the application windows do need to be treated differently (e.g. patch bays that can be connected together, or widgets that can be fused into larger widgets [1]) I have more sympathy for applications that want to do their own window management. But for something like the browser just grouping Web pages together, that's something entirely unrelated to the browser functionality that should be available in the window manager.

[1]: https://wiki.haskell.org/Eros

  • badsectoracula  3 days ago

    Well, yeah, it doesn't fit all applications and web browsers are a case where MDI doesn't really work. The linked site is more of a gimmick, at least as far as the documents go.

    But my response was about calling MDI an anti-pattern in general. Just because it doesn't fit all cases, it doesn't mean it is an anti-pattern.

    • Twey  3 days ago

      Oh no I get that the in-site MDI is a funny stylistic choice, and I've no problem with it. But the thing it's poking fun at is in-browser MDI, hence the comment.

      I stand by the anti-pattern comment. I think there are very, very few cases where ‘MDI’ is appropriate, and I put it in quotes because the things being managed in that case are almost never ‘documents’ in any meaningful sense (rather they're some kind of graph node). Functionality apps build with MDI is basically always independent of the actual app and would be better implemented in the window manager — and more often than not there's actually no additional functionality over even the lowest common denominator of window managers.

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