Twenty years after the general adoption of overlapping windows and the desktop metaphor, modern window systems
differ mainly in minor details such as window decorations or
mouse and keyboard bindings. While a number of innovative
window management techniques have been proposed, few of
them have been evaluated and fewer have made their way
into real systems. We believe that one reason for this is that
most of the proposed techniques have been designed using
a low fidelity approach and were never made properly available. In this paper, we present Metisse, a fully functional
window system specifically created to facilitate the design,
the implementation and the evaluation of innovative window
management techniques. We describe the architecture of the
system, some of its implementation details and present sev-
eral examples that illustrate its potential.
Keyword
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Human-Computer Interaction °
Engineering of Interactive Systems °
Window Systems
Group
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Human-Centered Computing
Contact
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CHAPUIS Olivier