On Saturday 22 November 2003 9:33 am, Lex Spoon wrote:
> Tim Rowledge <tim at sumeru.stanford.edu> wrote:
> > Personally I find it annoying that windows need to be at the top to be
> > active. Decades of using RISC OS have got me thoroughly used to being
> > able to interact with a window that can be in the middle of a big stack
> > without having to bring it to the front. Any part of it I can see, I can
> > handle.
>
> I wonder if it would work out to simply abandon the "active window"
> concept in Morphic?  Manipulate SystemWindows just like any others.  If
> you click, it will either pass the event or pick up the window,
> depending on where you click.  If you close a window, no other window
> pops in front of it (this is one that really aggravates students
> sometimes, by the way!).  We'd probably want the borders to be larger,
> so that you can pick up background windows more easily.
>
> It seems like it would work out pretty well.
>
> It would also be a brutal solution to a different problem, that of
> multiple people in Nebraska trying to work in the same project.  Right
> now, they have to collectively use just SystemWindow at a time; they
> can't each hack in their own simultaneously.

Yes, as it is there's this entirely different logic (top window, activate, 
etc.) for SystemWindows and everything else. So bare TextMorphs don't act 
like TextMorphs that happen to be inside a pane of a SystemWindow.