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

From: Reuben Thomas <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2017 12:58:06 +0000

3 December 2017 at 16:32, Mosè Giordano <[email-masked]> wrote:

> 2017-12-03 10:26 GMT+01:00 Reuben Thomas <[email-masked]>:
> >> 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.)​