Ethereal-dev: [ethereal-dev] Should the title bar give the name of the current capture file?
Currently, the title bar for the main Ethereal window says only "The
Ethereal Network Analyzer"; if you read in a capture file, it doesn't
say what file is displayed in that window.
Should it also list the name of the current capture file (assuming it's
not a temporary capture file)?
If so, should it put that before, or after, "Ethereal" or "The Ethereal
Network Analyzer"? In Windows, at least (and I think this tends to
happen in UNIX/X, as well), programs tend to put the name of the program
first, and any context information such as a file name second; if your
window manager/desktop/window system displays the *full* title of the
window along with an icon, that's probably OK, but:
the Windows 95/NT 4.0 task bar;
the KDE task bar;
probably at least some other task bars;
truncate the window title on the right, and some window managers may do
so as well, meaning that window titles in taskbars/icons/etc. tend to
say things such as
Microsoft Word (or just "Word", I forget which)
Netscape: Fun Wi...
and the like, which certainly tells you what program it is, but not what
that *particular* window is. (I seem to remember seeing somebody
complain about this on Windows.)
You probably still want *something* in the icon/taskbar entry/whatever
to tell you what program it is; Ethereal currently doesn't display an
icon (I have a version that uses the icon from "Information" message
boxes, but that icon needs tuning to look good if you have a
taskbar-based desktop, e.g. Exceed on Windows, using the Windows
taskbar, or KDE - the icon looks a bit ugly when shrunken down to 16x16,
or whatever the mini-icon size is for taskbars), so, unless we go with
an icon, we might want "Ethereal" to show up at the beginning of the
window name.
(Unfortunately, whilst, as I remember, X has provisions to let the
window manager tell you what size icons to use, so you could use a tuned
mini-icon on a taskbar-based desktop, neither the window manager in
Exceed nor "kdewm" - nor, I think, many other window managers - actually
tell you that the icons on the desktop are going to be tiny. The
"Windows 4.0" GUI - W9x and NT 4.0 - handles this, as I remember, by
letting you specify two different icons, so presumably 3.x uses the big
one and 4.x uses the small one.
This means that, unless an icon can be tuned to look good on a
taskbar-based desktop *and* a desktop with larger icons, we can't
arrange to have a good-looking icon in all circumstances.)
