[Thunar-dev] multiple thunar instances and session management half-baked

[Jannis Pohlmann]

Hey,

On Sun, 8 Mar 2009 14:14:10 +0100
Dennis Heuer <dh at triple-media.com> wrote:

> hello
> 
> i love thunar and see no option to it. that's why i'm in the need to
> convince you that the current way is half-baked.

That sounds like you're in a catastrophic situation. Poor you ;)
 
> thunar even works with the old xsm - allowing for even slimmer
> systems. this is rare today and great. however, generally, multiple
> thunar instances are remembered correctly, it seems. though i found
> that at about four instances the latter windows aren't correctly
> positioned (on workspaces). however, may be of other reasons. 

AFAIK, the positioning of windows on certain workspaces is out of the
scope of the individual applications. That's the window manager's
responsiblity. 

It would be nice if you could tell the window manager to remember
properties like workspace, position and size for some windows.
Enlightenment supports that and I really like it.

> the
> problem is not the positioning but that all instances share the same
> configuration. the thunar instance configured to look like a spatial
> view to show only some starters looks the same like the fully
> configured thunar for administrative tasks after a fresh login. this
> includes sorting, zoom, etc. 

First of all, you're confusing something here: there is just one
instance of Thunar. What you think are instances are in fact just
windows of that one instance.

In Thunar all windows are treated equal. There's a reason for it and
it's called simplicity. I wouldn't mind to add more window information
to the session bits there's a problem ...

> i please you to save the full state of an instance because otherwise
> thunar can't be used to stay open in parallel on multiple workspaces.

... the full state? First, that phrase needs a definition. What defines
the full state of a window (again: not an instance)? I can think of a
dozen of things that may be of interest here:

  - window size
  - window position (partly out of scope)
  - workspace (out of scope)
  - location (already implemented)
  - view type (detail, icon or list view)
  - side pane type (none, tree, bookmarks)
  - location bar type (pathbar, toolbar)
  - hidden files displayed or not
  - the full state of the tree side pane if it's used
  - open dialogs maybe
  - ...

I suppose there are a few more aspects I didn't mention yet. To make
Thunar aware of these in the context of session management, we would
have to

  - collect and save this information for each window
  - add command line parameters for every bit of information so that
    the session manager can create windows exactly as they were before

As you can (hopefully) see we'd have add a lot of code just to get that
right. I suppose that most people use Thunar like this: they open a
window, they do something (copying/renaming/whatever) and they close it
again when they're done. Given that scenario, I don't think it's worth
all the hassle to make Thunar restore all windows exactly as they were
before when resuming a session.

  - Jannis
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