How a window manager with tiling layouts makes a 1024x600 resolution livable.
I spend a lot of time in front of a screen, and for the past year I have
used only my netbook. No desktops, no laptops. Just a cheap $200 computer
that is nearly a kid's toy. The most challenging thing about this is
dealing with the 1024x600 screen resolution. When I moved to this screen
from something with many more pixels, it at first seemed very cramped.
After a year, I think that the most important part of coping with the small
screen is the flexability and customizability of layouts provided by the
Xmonad window manager. In this post I will explain a few layouts I have
developed for fitting specific tasks onto the netbook screen.
(I assume that you know maybe 0.1% of Haskell (about what I do),
and can read Haskell code without having a brain aneurysm.)
web browsing
It's important that the web browser have as few toolbars and other
cruft as possible, as horizontal space is especially at a premium. I've
configured both Epiphany and Firefox to put everything in one tool bar.
But now I use Chromium, which comes pre-configured that way.
What the netbook is designed for. You just want a web browser, taking up
the full screen, and with its own tabs. So far, so easy: that's Xmonad's
Full layout.
But, you sometimes want to see two websites side-by-side. This layout
accomplishes that, allowing the sizes to be adjusted as needed. It also
uses Xmonad's
Magnifier to zoom the smaller window when it's focused,
which is useful if you briefly need to see more of a web site.
mySplit = magnifiercz' 1.4 $ Tall nmaster delta ratio
where
-- The default number of windows in the master pane
nmaster = 1
-- Percent of screen to increment by when resizing panes
delta = 3/100
-- Default proportion of screen occupied by master pane
ratio = 60/100
web development
If you're doing web development, you'll want probably one big web browser
window, but also with a nice wide terminal on the same screen, in order to
see web server logs. A simple way to do this is to mirror Xmonad's
Tall
layout by 90 degrees.
myWide = Mirror $ Tall nmaster delta ratio
where
-- The default number of windows in the master pane
nmaster = 1
-- Percent of screen to increment by when resizing panes
delta = 3/100
-- Default proportion of screen occupied by master pane
ratio = 80/100
The
myWide layout uses the full screen width for a single terminal,
and splits the width when there are more. This is sufficient for viewing logs
and doing minor things at the shell prompt, in between testing the result in
the web browser. Of course a terminal can be temporarily moved to the master
area by pressing
mod-return, if you need it to be larger.
chat
Tips on configuring Pidgin for a netbook: Set it up to use vertical tabs to
save horizontal space. Configure the input area to only 1 line tall, and
turn off as much other cruft as you can. The menu bars, sadly, cannot be
disabled, nor can the excessively large borders. In my screenshots, you
can see that stuff wasting space that could be used to show four more lines
of text.
For chat, you want to put the buddy list on the side of the
screen, and use the rest for conversation windows. Xmonad's
IM module
takes care of allocating a sidebar on the screen for the buddy window. The
rest of the screen can be occupied by any layout you choose.
I like to have the conversation windows be as wide as possible, and
typically only want to see two conversations at a time. But sometimes I
might have a dozen visible. A good layout to cope with those needs is
Grid.
myChat' l = withIM size roster l
where
-- Ratio of screen roster will occupy
size = 1%5
-- Match roster window
roster = Title "Buddy List"
myChat = myChat' Grid
The
withIM layout puts the buddy list on the left; I prefer it on the right
for some reason, so I tweaked my layout to do that. All it took was
using the
reflectHoriz layout modifier to get a mirror image of
the layout. Then I reflect the inner layout back to its normal orientation.
Being able to throw in a few function calls and mutate a layout like that
is where Xmonad shines.
myChat' l = reflectHoriz $ withIM size roster $
reflectHoriz $ l
logs
Ever notice that
tail -f wastes the last line of the terminal? On a netbook
this matters.
shorttail
lets the last line be used.
I have a dedidated workspace that I use to tail logs, and as a place to
send long-running tasks (such as compiles). The layout for this needs to
keep windows wide, to see whole logged lines, but they need only be five
or so lines tall. And it's convenient to have one bigger window with the
small ones below. Xmonad has a perfect layout for this, called
Dishes,
because it's sorta like a stack of plates.
myDish = limitWindows 5 $ Dishes nmaster ratio
where
-- The default number of windows in the master pane
nmaster = 1
-- Default proportion of screen occupied by other panes
ratio = 1/5
In the second screenshot above, I have 6 windows open, but only 5 are
visible. The limitWindows 5 accomplishes this. It's handy mostly because
gnome-terminal has a bad habit of crashing when resized to 0x0.
(That's gotta be a bug in something!)
Notice that the screenshots above also have Procmeter in a sidebar on
the right. I (ab)used the
withIM layout to do that:
myLogs' l = reflectHoriz $ withIM procmeterSize procmeter $
reflectHoriz $ l
where
-- Ratio of screen procmeter will occupy
procmeterSize = 1%7
-- Match procmeter
procmeter = ClassName "ProcMeter3"
myLogs = myLogs' myDish
coding
Everything above was easy. Doing coding (or writing) on a small screen is
where it gets hard. When I'm coding I want to have one window that is
exactly 80 columns wide, and as tall as possible, where I do the main
development. Then I need a minimum of two other windows also visible: one
action window for running tests and the like, and one to view references
(emails, man pages, other files, etc). I may need to view any of these
windows fullscreen at any time, of course.
As an example of the three window rule:
While I'm writing this post, I have a reference window open
with my .xmonad/xmonad.hs, and an action window open where I am
managing screenshots.
Often, deep into something, I will accumulate many other reference and action
windows. But three seems to be the magic, minimum number for me;
use of
screen or anything else doesn't reduce it; if I can't see all
three at once, I will waste time and concentration flipping back and forth.
The Xmonad layout I've developed to handle this is based on the handy
FixedColumn layout, which automatically keeps the master window 80
columns wide. I modify this by adding the
Magnifier, so that my action
and reference windows "pop out" over the master window when focused.
myCode = limitWindows 3 $ magnifiercz' 1.4 $ FixedColumn 1 20 80 10
The 1.4 was carefully tuned, to magnify a window to be big enough to be
usable for editing, reading, or command-line, while not obscuring too much
of the other two windows. And again I use
limitWindows, to only show
three windows, in order to keep them all as big as possible. Other windows
are hidden offscreen, but I can rotate to them with alt-tab as needed.
reading ebooks
When I'm reading an ebook, I want to have the reader in the middle of the
screen. But a widescreen netbook like mine is too wide to comfortably
read text all the way across, so it's nice to have margins. (In the margins,
I put terminals, or notes.)
The
ThreeColumns module has a layout that does just that.
myBook = ThreeColMid nmaster delta ratio
where
nmaster = 1
-- Percent of screen to increment by when resizing panes
delta = 3/100
-- Default proportion of screen occupied by master pane
ratio = 2/3
putting it all together
I join all my layouts together, so Xmonad will allow switching
between them. These three combinations all have the same layouts,
only ordered differently, so that different workspaces can have
different default layouts.
codeFirst = myCode myWide myGrid myDish
dishFirst = myDish myCode myWide myGrid
gridFirst = myGrid myDish myCode myWide
Xmonad layouts can be decorated with things like title bars. To save
horizontal space, I leave off the title bars on layouts where they
are not needed to disambiguate windows. Two helper functions can be applied
to add or remove titles (and also cause the layout to avoid the Gnome
panel.)
withTitles l = noFrillsDeco shrinkText myTheme (desktopLayoutModifiers l)
noTitles l = desktopLayoutModifiers l
I have semi-dedicated workspaces; one for each of the above activities.
To assign a layout to a workspace, I use the
PerWorkspace module.
Notice that the "web" workspace has only two available layouts.
Meanwhile, the "book" workspace always uses the specialized myBook
layout; I don't use that layout elsewhere.
perWS = onWorkspace "logs" (withTitles $ myLogs' dishFirst) $
onWorkspace "web" (noTitles $ (mySplit myWide)) $
onWorkspace "chat" (noTitles $ myChat' gridFirst) $
onWorkspace "book" (noTitles $ myBook) $
(withTitles $ codeFirst)
Finally, I allow toggling between the currently selected layout and
fullscreen mode, and use
smartBorders to avoid displaying borders when
there is only one window onscreen.
myLayout = smartBorders $ toggleLayouts Full perWS
Xmonad layout optimised for the small screen of a netbook:
Done!
(For now...)
PS: Thanks to
#xmonad regulars for always having the answer
I need up their sleeves.
Last month I joined Mozilla as a UI engineer on the Fennec (Mobile
Firefox) project. Firefox is already available for Nokia's Maemo platform, and
now a group of Mozilla programmers are porting it to Google's Android OS.
This Tuesday they made an early preview build available for public feedback.
Until now, the only people working on Firefox for Android were platform
developers getting the back-end code to build and run. This week was the
first time most other people including me got to try it
out. We front-end developers and designers are now starting to adapt the
user interface to Android. (The preview build used the look and feel of
Firefox for Maemo, designed for rather different hardware and software.)
Because we are an open source project, we like to share our work and hear your
feedback even at this early stage of development. While I wasn't directly
involved in the Android development effort, I spent some of my spare time this
week talking to users via Twitter and our Android feedback group. Here's
what I heard, in rough order of importance to users, plus some information on
our future plans.1
One for the note-to-self file...
Strangely, it's labeled as a "Mustek 1200 UB Plus" on the unit itself, but
lsusb says it's a "Ultima Electronics Corp. Artec Ultima 2000
(GT6801 based)/Lifetec LT9385/ScanMagic 1200 UB Plus Scanner"
apt-get install xsane sane-utils
Alex released 
The 
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In recent times I have worked on removing a few very user-visible regressions in Epiphany, which I see as the most demanding WebKitGTK+ user in GNOME, such as 
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When you just read the following sentence:
"usage of a software, that can only be used together with the Internet Explorer".
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