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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
