Re: Way to have terminal/console application stack in gnome like in KDE 3.5's kicker?

["Dr. Ed Morbius" <dredmorbius@gmail.com>]

on 20:51 Wed 16 Feb, D G Teed (donald.teed@gmail.com) wrote:
> Having lost KDE 3.5 in the squeeze update, and not being satisfied with the
> new KDE 4.* (frankly, I think it is very poorly designed), I am looking for
> a desktop
> which can stack running terminal sessions.
> 
> Let's say I have 50 Konsole or gnome-terminal windows open, each to a
> different remote box.  I want to click on the panel area and select one by
> name which is already open.  I could do that in KDE 3.5.  Firefox and other
> apps could do this too.  How is this done in gnome or what options are there
> for managing many open sessions of something?

For simply managing windows, I find WindowMaker vastly superior to KDE,
GNOME, or XFCE4.  There's a window list by default (middle-mouse on
desktop, or <F11>).  This is pinnable, and it's pretty easy to select
and walk through a set of windows quickly (though you can't, say,
text-search through a list of names, which would be sort of cool).

    http://main.linuxfocus.org/~georges.t/menu.html

You might even find a "mouseless" tiling/tabing WM (e.g.: ionwm) to be
useful in this context.  You can designate sections of your desktop to
specific apps, and stack up multiple instances of an app in one spot.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_(window_manager)

Sadly, development on numerous good but older WMs has stagnated (ion's
in stasis since late 2009, WindowMaker's last upstream commits were in
2005).

I'd also suggest you look at your workflow if it requires you to keep 50
open remote shell sessions:

  - Generally: scripting remote interactions.
  - Use 'dsh' or other tools to run similar commands on multiple
    systems.
  - Manage systems via puppet, monit, etc., rather than interactively.
  - Use the KDE Terminal / GNOME Terminal built-in multiplexing
    features.
  - Use another terminal multiplexer such as screen or tmux.


What are you doing that requires 50 terminal sessions?  How do you plan
on managing this when your server count doubles?  Increases by an order
of magnitude?

-- 
Dr. Ed Morbius, Chief Scientist /            |
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