Re: Workspace/desktop switching
On Tuesday 18 November 2003 01:19 am, 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?
Use #1: Efficient parallelizing
Obviously it's going to depend on what you do with your machine,
but I do a lot of time intensive hand-off tasks. This often has to
do with download/upload times, but also sometimes with disk-access,
or even CPU time on a remote machine (won't help if it's local,
unless we're talking about multiple processors which I don't have).
Why wait for a long download when you can be browsing the
web or working on your development project at the same time?
And switching desktops is usually *much* faster (2-3X) than
opening/closing individual app windows in actual computer
time, and even faster when you consider that it takes fewer
mouse clicks.
Use#2: More space to spread out in
[Doing this now]
Just as an example (and this incorporates some of #1) I develop
Zope products (web apps). I keep a master copy on the file
server, and periodically mirror it into the "Products" directory and
refresh as part of the development cycle. During this time, I
usually have one desktop with two gVim windows (I prefer
separate windows over the internal panes, BTW), one on the
main source module I'm editing and one on to browse files it
depends on -- usually to read, but I sometimes need to make
edits there. Then I have an xterm logged in as the Zope user
which I use to mirror the results.
I use a 2nd desktop to have a browser window pointed at the
local Zope server, usually with several tabs addressing the
Product refresh page, an object-tree browser page, and the
page where I actually see the output.
I use a 3rd desktop with a tabbed browser pointing at the local
Python manual, Zope.org, Python.org, and google for researching
questions as they come up.
For testing: 1) save source files, 2) up arrow and enter to run
the "cp" command that copies the sources to the Products
directory, 3) swap desktops, swap tabs, click "refresh" wait
for response, 4) swap to output screen, click reload and check
the results. It's not quite as simple as compile, link, run, but
web apps are like that. There's also a unit-testing mode which
hopefully I've mostly completed before getting to this level.
I use a 4th desktop to hold my email client. I may have one or
two emails open at a time. Sometimes I'll start writing a question
to a list and then realize I can figure out the answer for myself
and stop. Of course, I also use it to take a break and answer
a question myself. Like now. Sometimes I need to swap over
to my reference desktop to check something about my answer
or verify a URL.
So that's four. Right now I have two more in use, because I also
have a separate development project that I'm just collecting
information for. That's three xterms logged onto remote machines
at my clients site: one each on two machines (different architectures,
as I have to install software for both), and one with w3m running in
the window. I'm using it to download software package files. That's
on desktop #5.
The 6th desktop just has XMMS in it, because I'm listening to music.
Occasionally, I minimize apps. But as I said, it's usually more
faster to switch desktops than to go to and from the taskbar.
I used to be limited by the CPU speed and RAM (2 or 3 big
apps would strap the computer), but I've upgraded, so now
I'm mostly limited by how much I can think about at once
(which is how it ought to be ;-) ).
Note this is KDE 2.2.2 that comes with "Woody". My biggest
complaint is that I haven't figured out how to sweep virtual-desktop
style from desktop to desktop (like I could with FVWM), but
must manually click which one I want. I figure there's probably
a setting somewhere that controls that (or will be in KDE 3?),
but it's not really such a pain -- I've already gotten used to it.
Cheers,
Terry
--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.anansispaceworks.com
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