On Sat, 26 May 2007 12:54:21 -0400, Joe Smith wrote: > How do you folks manage your working windows? I find that working on a > standard WIMP desktop is a distracting battle of locating and arranging > in the needed windows. The current tools, specifically in the default > Fedora Gnome desktop are not working well for me, but maybe I've missed > something. > > Here's what I've tried: [...] > Other suggestions? What obvious solution have I missed? Here's one. It's probably much more demanding of the hardware than optimal, but it works for me. First, set up your panel with a specific unchanging place for the the workspace switcher -- with several more workspaces than you ever normally use. Then assign one and only one space to each of your much-used apps. Mine has two rows of eight workspaces each. I keep a gnome-terminal in the top left; Firefox to its right; Galeon and Epiphany to the right of that (not maximized; they overlap about 85%, but not totally. One fits into the upper left corner, and the other into the lower right corner); several workspaces are normally empty; and then Pan is last on the right. On the second row, the leftmost space is usually empty, but reserved for Konqueror (which I use mainly for man pages); then Opera; then blanks. My terminal has several tabs routinely open, each with a specific use -- and each with its own soft background color : green for routine, blue for root, pink for ssh-scp, etc. Since I do 90% of my email on a remote machine under ssh, the last tab is pink and devoted to that. If, say, I want to use ssh or scp to access my wife's machine on the next floor, I open a separate terminal, with a pink tab, on a vacant space just for that. My newsreader, as I mentioned, is in the upper right corner. The space next to it is reserved for the default browser, in case I open it from a usenet or Gmane message; and the space below it is reserved for posts by me while I work on them. (This one is there, for instance, and will be till I hit send.) The way this system works is that you soon get past paying conscious attention to it, since it doesn't change. When you want to shift tasks, your fingers automatically click on the right switcher square, and there you are, with your app open and still where you left it. When I try something like Puppy Linux, which emulates the Evil OS too closely (let alone choke down my disgust and dual-boot a machine to XP), I soon feel manacled by the lack of this system. Detail : of course each browser has at least one standard set of tabs, with standard sites on each. Galeon and Epiphany, for instance, both serve mainly for following web forums; that's why they share a workspace. Extra detail, of possible interest : so long as my outdated machines remain usable, I keep them, behind a KVM switch, also for dedicated purposes. Since I follow weather fairly intensely, for instance, there is one old machine whose main and almost only purpose is to keep an instance of Opera open with a default session of twenty-odd weather tabs. That takes that graphic-intensive load off the machine(s) in more frequent use. -- Beartooth Staffwright, Wordcrafty Squirreler FC 6; Pine 4.64, Pan 0.129; Privoxy 3.0.3 Dillo 0.8.6, Opera 9.21, Firefox 1.5, Galeon 2.0.3 Remember I have little idea what I am talking about.
