Ramblings From Justin Penney

Our Mini didn't come with Leopard pre-installed and the DVD that was supposed to have been included in the box was also missing. Calling Apple tech support between Christmas and New Years was impossible.

So far the only major improvement are the visuals. The translucent menu bar and the reflective dock are neat looking. For as much as I use computers I don't really end up using all that many fancy features.

I used to be very concerned with the appearance and work flow of my desktop. I used AfterStep on Linux for a long time. Many hours were spent theming it and making the virtual desktop work just how I wanted. Once WindowMaker came to supplant AfterStep I made heavy use of the workspace model. This carried over into BlackBox and GNOME and KDE.

I kept a workspace for each type of application. Terminals were on 1, browser on 2, communication (email, IM, IRC) on 3, and everything else on 4. I always mapped Alt-F1 through Alt-F4 to jump to the workspaces. As I started using Windows more the Alt-F4 habit was tremendously frustrating. It was also tough not have the workspaces at all (the TweakUI options just never felt right to me). So I stopped. My GNOME desktop on my work computer still has four workspaces but they are neglected except in a few rare occasions. Every so often I will have a couple of projects going and I will relegate a workspace to each project. Recently we started to Wiki-ize our cluster manual so I used a workspace to hold the OpenOffice manual and a browser window open to the wiki right next to each other so the cut, paste, revise flow was easier than alt-tabbing constantly. This allowed me to keep my normal terminal and browser windows open and not feel overly cluttered.

Now everything has some concept of workspaces. I may have to revisit this concept now that I can do it on everything but our Windows laptop which has no hope of ever running vista. If I do, I think I prefer to break the workspaces up by project rather than the application type.

I should mention that a big change that made me able to move to a single space was my move to using screen in my terminal. I used to pile up rxvt windows until I would completely forget which was which. Now I have a screen session that I keep open with six windows. After adjusting to the new key combinations it works wonderfully. Actually, the use of copy mode for a scrollback buffer is now so ingrained that I default to using that over Shift-PgUp! I almost always hit Ctrl-A-Esc a couple times before I realise that it is having no effect.

# posted by Justin @ 10:32 PM