Re: Musings on debian-user list
On Mon, 03 Aug 2009 21:54:56 -0400
Chris Jones <cjns1989@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 08:20:58PM EDT, John Hasler wrote:
> > Chris Jones writes:
> > > I guess so.. though I'm not sure about the usefulness thereof,
> > > save for demo'ing the flexibility of, what's the word.. Window
> > > Managers..?
> >
> > Organization. I can have an FVWM "desktop" with a couple of dozen
> > "panes" for each of umpteen projects. I can then, for rxample,
> > switch quickly from the environment where I am working on Chrony,
> > with a couple of Emacs instances, a debugger, an xterm running
> > "tail -f" on a log, etc, to the desktop where I am studing music
> > theory and have Noteedit, Solfege, etc running.
>
> Yes John, but why would one need all shapes of xterms with
> extraordinary dimensions to achieve this..? I mean, most terminal
> screen-oriented apps assume some form of 4:3 geometry to begin with..
>
> If you need the editor, a shell, a debugger, and a log tail displaying
> concurrently on the one physical screen to achieve what you are
> working one faster and more effectively, fine.. but as I hinted
> above, I suspect that in most circumstances, having all that stuff
> visible on the same display is often a case of showing off one's
> environment.. screenshot feed, no more..
>
> Sounds like you're talking IDE.. but correct me if I'm wrong, doesn't
> text-mode emacs provide all of this, and more - even on a barebones
> linux console..??
>
> But never mind, what I really was saying is that I'm as much of an
> idiot as the next guy for wasting huge amounts of time to set up,
> modify, etc. my computing interface.. and all the same I often feel
> that better folks than myself do not care too much about such aspects.
>
> I mean.. I'm a mediocre hobbyist programmer, trying to make some sense
> of some C code that clearly shows its age, via vim and gdb.. Now, do I
> really need, am I really going to keep an eye on, half a dozen five
> line xterms that tail all my system's logs while I chug along..?
>
> In my case the tradeoff at this point is to have whatever I'm working
> on full screen - with some form of split/windowed display when
> useful.. and a minimal one-line last (status in gnu/screen
> parlance..) line of the screen display a bunch of automatically
> refreshed counters that provide me with a summary of what's going on
> in my system.. as much as I can grasp in one eyeful.
>
> And naturally use different X desktops in order to instantly switch
> to a different environment as necessary.
>
> Thanks,
>
> CJ
>
>
Chris,
I've found Compiz-fusion useful to keep multiple things going..
ctrl-alt--> giving a new desktop quickly... YMMV.
Jack
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