bug#29525: Please don't default to "--unique" mode for Okular

[Reuben Thomas]

 3 December 2017 at 16:32, Mosè Giordano <address@hidden> wrote:

2017-12-03 10:26 GMT+01:00 Reuben Thomas <address@hidden>:
>> If you are working with many documents at the same time (say 3-4 or
>> even more) switching between Emacs and the wanted document can be
>> really annoying, using C-c C-v brings to focus the right instance of
>> the viewer.  This is what Evince does and is much more convenient.
>
>
> I agree, but this is a problem to solve with the window manager, not the
> application behaviour.

I don't see how it's a problem of the windows manager.  I happen to
have several programs open at the same time and often switch between
them.  For example, I'm using the terminal, than switch to Emacs and
want to see the output document.  The next window that can be reached
by ALT + TAB is the terminal, not Okular, how could the window manager
guess I want to switch directly to the document viewer?

I suggest that there are two different things going on here:

1. Should an application be run single-instance, should it raise an ​existing instance if there is one for the same document, or should it always start a new one? This is a window management problem: it should be configured in the window manager. The user might prefer different rules for different apps: for example, one might be more likely to want multiple windows showing the same document in an editor than in a viewer.

2. In some cases (for example, going back and forth between LaTeX editor and PDF preview) a more specialised protocol is used. (However, my bug report was not about this case, it was simply about launching a viewer for the current file.) In this case, the behaviour should depend on the protocol (but again, should work the same for different viewers).

 

I missed to stress one important point of C-c C-v

​There seems to be some confusion here: you brought up C-c C-v; I didn't mention it. I was just using the plain "View" command from the C-c C-c menu. (I guess I should investigate forward search again, though, it's obviously useful.)​