On Tuesday 21 September 2010 23:12:12 Oliver Kullmann wrote:
On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 01:27:26PM -0400, Anton Aylward wrote:
Oliver Kullmann said the following on 09/21/2010 01:07 PM:
But that's rather cumbersome.
Maybe its me, but a work-flow involving that many virtual screens and that many windows seems cumbersome and confusing. I don't know how you keeps that much context information in your head - its beyond my abilities.
It's quite the contrary: exactly in order that I don't have to keep things in my head, I make them external. My understanding of the "desktop" is that of a "house" (thus I think "desktop" is quite misleading), with many rooms, for each special activity/project a dedicated room with special equipment for that purpose, which *stays*. So I just need to remember the activity/project, go to the "room", and there I find everything which *reminds* me of all the details.
I've got a simple life:
one desktop for messages - normally just email one desktop for web browsers one desktop for file browsers and things that start from files one desktop or terminals
Two desktops for 'scratch' - which means 'other applications'
So what's your disciple and organization?
Unfortunately there are only 20 virtual desktops, so I can't really do what I would like to do. But so well, currently at my workplace I have "System" for general system-tasks, 3 virtual desktops related to administrational tasks (I work at a University), two virtual desktops regarding writing papers, reports, books, one vt for access to the literature, one for my open-source project, one for another research project, one for a conference I organised, one for letters I'm writing, one for documentation, one for the Internet, one for my web pages, one for the calendar and such things, one for e-mail.
Hah, I just realised that these are only 16. Now I remember that at some crash I "lost" some, and didn't get them back :-(.
At home, where I do the real work (my research), there are really 20, and they are more related to various research projects.
Developing the virtual desktop system would in my opinion by extremely useful, and should actually be rather simple. One needed for example some kind of history (where have I been?). And the creation of dynamic virtual desktops (a kind of tree-structure, for temporary projects). For example with my open-source project, I have to open five files related to some C++ issue, at this time I realise that there is some underlying mathematical problem, for which I open, say, 3 other files (motivated, but at a different level), furthermore for the plans/milestones I have to open 7 more files; yet this all has to live in one virtual desktop (but that's at least something!), and if dynamically more could be created, which would have some specific relation to the existing ones, then it would be much easier to interrupt the work (other projects, administrational work, ...), and come back, and since I find the open files within a structure(!), it would be much easier to be reminded of what still needs to be done.
Realistically I have around 10 large research projects, and, say, 100 smaller ones. The big task is to manage that --- a real "desktop environment" ("housetop environment") would help enormously.
This kind of organized working is what the ongoing Activities work in KDE aims to support. It's an elaboration of the classification possible using virtual desktops by putting windows on them. Activities includes the desktop furniture in the context - allowing, for example, a different folder to provide the desktop icons on each activity, or a different set of app menus on the panel. They break the conventional limitations of virtual desktops, by allowing windows to be members of >1 Activity. In the near future Activity hints will be available to applications so they can adapt to the context they are running in, eg "KMail helps me focus by only showing the mail folders relevant to the Acme project while I am using the Acme activity" or "Kopete sets my work IM account Away when I switch to my Social activity". The challenge is to make this available so that it is comprehensible and useful to those without a scientist's ingrained love of order - we've already all had the "I clicked a button and all my programs went away" response to virtual desktops from new users. I hope that's interesting Will -- Will Stephenson, openSUSE Team SUSE LINUX Products GmbH - Nürnberg - AG Nürnberg - HRB 16746 - GF: Markus Rex -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org