Re: Workspace/desktop switching
On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 01:19:41AM -0600, Alex Malinovich wrote:
} I've been seeing a lot of discussions about various WM's lately, and
} everyone seems to be extremely concerned about easy workspace switching.
} I'm just wondering what exactly everyone uses workspaces for? Every once
} in a while, if I'm doing two things at once that each require 5 windows
} a piece, I'll use two desktops/workspaces, but I don't think I've ever
} really gone over that. That leads me to believe that there's some
} unrealized benefit that I'm missing out on. So what do you use your
} workspaces for, and why are they so important?
Way back when, in 1994, I had a summer job which had me in front of an X
terminal (8-bit, true, but 1600x1200) hooked up to the "fast" machine (a
Sparc5) where they had nothing for me to do for the first three or four
weeks. They told me to "familiarize myself with the system."
I tried the following window managers at that time: twm, ctwm, vtwm, tvtwm,
fvwm (I'm not sure it had even reached 1.0 yet), olwm, olvwm, mwm, 4Dwm (we
had an SGI around), and piewm (which is really just a variant of tvtwm with
pie menus). Though I liked the look of olwm/olvwm (call me crazy, but I
actually liked OpenLook), the configuration was annoying. Several were
simply too short on functionality (twm, ctwm, fvwm, mwm, 4Dwm). It came
down to piewm, tvtwm, and vtwm. I found that vtwm had a slower way of
switching virtual workspaces, plus tvtwm has a feature I have never seen in
any other window manager ever: the ability to drag a full-size window into
the mini virtual desktop and be able to continue moving it to the desired
desktop within the mini view. The only reason I chose tvtwm over piewm is
that it seemsed that tvtwm was still being developed (though it turned out
that it actually wasn't).
Since 1994, I have used my first desktop for local work, my second desktop
for web (yes, I was doing web work in 1994), and my third desktop for
remote connections. Nowadays my fourth desktop is dedicated to VMWare or
VNC (call it my "alien environments" desktop, since VMWare is used for
WinXP and VNC is used for MacOS X). I actually keep 10 desktops, but
generally only use the first four. The rest are there if I need them. Also,
a blank desktop is a dandy "boss key" (for those of you who remember such
things).
} Alex Malinovich
--Greg
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