Abstract

A window manager is a software that sits on top of the operating system to provide a graphical interface and determine the appearance, position, and behaviour of windows. An example of a window manager is WindowMaker (http://www.windowmaker.org, for a list of X window managers see http://xwinman.org). A window manager is responsible among other things for decorating the windows and handling window resizing and repositioning.

Throughout the development of user interfaces, window managers have received lots of attention due to their important role in human computing. Current developments include the creation of 3D desktops such as Sun Microsystems's project looking glass and the many functions added to window managers to facilitate user interaction such as grouping of common tasks and mouse gestures.

However, there are still some challenges facing the designers of window managers. Some of these issues are reduction and prevention of screen cluttering, intelligent window placement, and catering for disadvantaged users (such as vision impaired users) using techniques like voice recognition and magnification.

In this paper we investigate the use of Empirical Modelling techniques in modelling the behaviour of a window manager called Edenwm. We aim to model the interaction of the user by means of high level definitions. We consider the window manager to be an agent acting to keep the user's desktop uncluttered by means of intelligent window placement. The user is a different agent with high level goals to achieve (like editing a particular document displayed on a particular window) as well as low level goals (such as focusing a window). We claim that window managers can benefit from using the notion of dependencies to enhance the user experience.