Terminal; and IANAD Stuff

[Jud]

Reading some threads in the -dev list and using 4.2 over the past few
weeks, I thought I would make a couple of comments, for what they are
worth.

A few of the messages in -dev involved whether to make Terminal part of
XFCE, and some others involved expressions of a bit of post-release
letdown.  If it helps, Benedikt, let me say that of all the changes in
and surrounding XFCE4.2, Terminal is my absolute favorite.  It is far
more useful to me than the alternatives (tabs - that was a great idea),
offers a bit of nice stuff for entertainment value, but doesn't feel at
all overweight.  If that was the sweet spot you were aiming for, well,
you hit it.

Regarding future development goals of the project, IANAD (...not a
developer).  This is simply one user's opinion that may run to
generalities, so I don't know if it is at all useful, but then again it
won't do any harm.  So here goes:

- Lightweight-but-useful is what attracted me to XFCE (I had been using
Blackbox).  It is very important to me that whatever window manager or
desktop environment I use must be lightweight and responsive first and
foremost.

- Feature creep is the enemy.  Thus, though I love Terminal, my
sentiment would be to either substitute it for xfterm4 or leave it
separate (and perhaps xfterm4 as well).  Don't have more than one
terminal emulator as part of the XFCE package - that way lies GNOME/KDE.

- Clearly define an XFCE core that offers about the same functions as
the XFCE package does today, and perhaps even less in the future (e.g.,
if someone comes up with a project that offers both audio and video
capabilities, choose it or xfce4-mixer, or have both available
separately).  Everything outside this fairly restricted core should be
available separately rather than as part of the XFCE package.  This
doesn't bar making a nice group of separate packages (like what was done
with xfce-goodies) for user convenience.  Of course, the folks
developing the core stuff should try to be polite and not break the
separate items too often.  :)

- If the core functions are relatively static, what is there for
developers of these core functions to work on?  Well, you have already
identified key items related to light weight and responsiveness, such as
memory usage.  And I have no doubt you have many more innovative UI
ideas of the kind that make XFCE and associated applications such a
pleasure to use.  (I have already mentioned the tabs in Terminal; it is
very easy to add or remove items from the menu and Taskbar; and it is
trivial to change the background.  What about some of the things that
aren't intuitive from the UI, like setting default terminal emulator and
browser/documentation browser?  Could these sorts of options be moved
into the UI?)

- For people like me who do not mind editing text config files, I find
the documentation of XFCE's config files a bit lacking still.  I'm still
searching for whatever config file entry corresponds to the
anti-aliasing and hinting checkboxes in the settings manager plugins UI.
 It would be nice if these aspects of XFCE configuration were made more
transparent to users.  (Or perhaps they have been, and I haven't looked
hard enough?)

In closing, I do not want to forget to thank all of the developers
explicitly for their work.  You have made something beautiful (in the
sense of appearance and functionality) that I use and am grateful for
every day.

Jud