Many months ago I stumbled upon
this German written meme about how users use their virtual
desktops. I use virtual desktops since my very early Unix times
(
tvtwm
on Sun Sparc SLC/ELC/IPX with greyscale screens running SunOS 4.x), so
in the meanwhile I use them nearly everywhere the same way.
Short Summary
3x5, no overlapping windows, either tiling or fullscreen, keyboard
navigation, xterms,
yeahconsole,
FVWM, panel for systray.
Window Manager of Choice
My window manager of choice is FVWM since more than a decade. I tried
others like
Sawfish, Metacity and Compiz, but I couldn t get them
behave like the FVWM I got used to, so I always came back.
Since I hate overlapping windows, I use FVWM a lot like a tiling
window manager. FVWM has this nice function to maximize windows so
that they occupy as much space as available, but do not overlap other
windows. This function was also often missing when I tried other
window managers. I though do not want to use real tiling window
managers since I have a few sticky windows around (e.g. the panner
with the virtual desktops and
xosview) and they shouldn t be
overlapped either.
Virtual Desktops
Switching between virtual desktops is done with the keyboard only
with Ctrl-Shift as modifier and the cursor keys. The cursor keys are
usually pressed with thumb, ring and small finger of the right hand.
Which hand presses Ctrl and Shift depend on the situation and keyboard
layout, but it s usually either ring and small finger of the left
hand, or pointer and middle finger of the right hand. So I m able to
switch the virtual desktop with only one hand.
I have always three rows of virtual desktops and usually four or five
columns.
The top row is usually occupied with xterms. It s my work space. The
top left workspace usually contains at least one xterms with a shell
and one with
mutt, my favourite e-mail client since nearly a decade.
At home the second left virtual desktop in the top row usually
contains a full-screen
Liferea (my preferred feed reader) while at
work it contains the
GNU Emacs main window besides two xterms. Emacs
and the emacs server are automatically started at login.
This also means that I switch the virtual desktops when I switch
between mutt and Emacs for typing the content of an e-mail. Did this
already during my studies. (At home mutt runs inside a screen, so
there I just switch the virtual terminal with Ctrl-A Ctrl-A instead of
the virtual desktop. Not that big difference ;-)
The other virtual desktops of the the top row get filled with xterms
as needed. Usually one virtual desktop per task.
The middle row is for web browsers. One full screen browser (usually
Conkeror or
Opera) per virtual desktop, often opened with many tabs
(tabs in Opera, buffers in Conkeror) related to the task I m
accomplishing in the xterms in the virtual deskop directly above.
The third row usually contains root shells for maintenance tasks,
either permanently open ones on machines I need an administrate often
(e.g. daily updates of
Debian testing or Debian unstable machines), or
for temporary mass administration (
Linux workstations on the job, all
Xen DomUs of one Xen server, etc.) using
pconsole.
yeahconsole
Additionally I have a sticky yeahconsole running, an xterm which
slides down from the top like the console in Quake. (It s the only
overlapping thing I use. :-) My yeahconsole can be activated on every
virtual desktop by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Z (with QWERTY layout, Ctrl-Alt-Y
with QWERTZ layout). It s the terminal for those one-line jobs then
and when, e.g. calling ccal, translate, wget or
clive.
Changes over time
Of course the desktop usage changes from time to time:
At work I have more than one monitor, so in the meanwhile the second
row with the web browsers moved to the second screen with
independent virtual desktops (multiple X servers, no Xinerama). The
second row on the main screen at work is now used the same way as the
third row with a slight preference for the permanently open shells
while the third row is more used for mass administration with
pconsole.
At home I used
XMMS respective
Audacious for a long time (my FVWM
panner and xosview are exactly as wide as WinAmp2/
XMMS/Audacious,
guess why:-) which usually was sticky the same way as the panner and
xosview are. But when I started using last.fm recently, I moved to
Rhythmbox (after testing some other music players like e.g. Amarok)
which I use in fullscreen as I do with web browsers and the feed
reader. So it occupies a complete virtual desktop, usually the second
one in the middle row below the feed reader because I don t need a
corresponding web browser for the feed reader. (Just found out that
there is a
last.fm
player for text-mode, so maybe that will change again. :-)
Another thing which changed my virtual desktop usage was the switch
from a classical tabbed web browser (
Galeon,
Kazehakase, Opera) to the
buffer oriented Conkeror. With a tabbed web browser I have either no
overview over all open tabs (one row tab bar or truncated tab menu) or
they occupy too much space of the browser window. That was another
reason for more than one browser window and therefore more than one
virtual desktop with fullscreen web browser windows. With Conkeror
tabs are optional (and not even enabled by default), Conkeror uses
buffer like Emacs and if you want to switch to another buffer, you
press C-x b and then start typing parts of the buffer s name (e.g.
parts of the
URL or the web page title) to narrow down the list of
buffers until only one is left or until you have spotted the wanted
buffer in the list and choose it with the cursor keys. So the need for
more than one browser window is gone.
For a long time I didn t need any task/menu/start/whatever bar on my
desktop. But since neither NetworkManager nor
wicd have a comand-line
interface (yet) and bluetooth seems also easier handled from the
system tray my laptops also use either
gnome-panel (big screen, long
sessions with FVWM) or lxpanel (formerly used trayer; use it on small
screen, short sessions with
ratpoison or matchbox) on my laptops. It s
sticky and always visible. (No overlapping, remember? ;-)
The panel is usually at the bottom on the screen as by default with
Windows or
KDE, not at top as with
GNOME and MacOS. Only on the
OpenMoko, I have the panel at the top to be close to what I m used
from Nokia mobile phones.
Things I tried
but didn t survive in my setup:
- Desktop icons nearly always covered if you use a tiling
window manager. (I though use root window menus mostly for
starting applications later occupying that space where I clicked.
;-)
- A button to minimize all windows. Only sissies without virtual
deskops need that. ;-)
- Automatically scrolling logfile content on the desktop
(root-tail, root-portal, etc) the space was too precious to not
use it for xterms or web browsers. ;-)
Systems without Virtual Desktops
Anyway, there are systems where I don t use virtual desktops at all.
On systems with a screen resolution so small that there s not enough
space for two non-overlapping, fixed font 80x25 xterms on the screen
(e.g. on my MicroClient with 8 touch screen, the 7
EeePC or the
OpenMoko) I do not use virtual desktops at all. On such systems I use
all applications in fullscreen, so switching between applications is
like switching virtual desktops anyway. My window managers of choice
for such systems are ratpoison for systems with keyboard and matchbox
for system without keyboard. With ratpoison you treat windows like
terminals in
GNU screen, so there are no new keybindings to learn if
you re already used to screen (which I use nearly daily since more
than a decade).
A disjunct set of people, who I will also not name, were very disappointed to find out that 