On 02/06/2012 05:21 PM, Philipp Haselwarter wrote:
completely skipping on your question, but you just got me curious -- what kind of task do you work on that allows/requires you to use four monitors?
Heh! Well, I'm GLAD YOU ASKED. :) Gives me an opportunity to expound on my WM history and thinking. --- What I'm doing now. All my screens are set up portrait. My leftmost screen usually holds email or IM panels. My rightmost screen usually holds a web browser. My two center screens hold whatever project I'm working on, and I tend to think of the project screens in pairs. So right this instant, my left-center screen is an org-mode emacs buffer with a data-collection status report I just updated. I've also got two shells in it, mostly squooshed to the bottom, with an R session that helps me develop the analytics that go in the report, and a random shell in that report directory so I can e.g. run data-collection sripts. The right-center is full-screen of an evince window, which is displaying the output of the most recent build of the report. Here's a picture, if anyone cares. http://muntok.routhouse.org/pictures/misc/ These days I'm optimizing by identifying visual work patterns, and making it easier to set them up quickly. So I've got a keystroke bound to "basic TSM monitoring" (I manage some backup infrastructure) and one to "Document project 1", etc. , ((modm .|. shiftMask, xK_s ), do { windows (viewOnScreen 0 "tsmmon" )
windows (viewOnScreen 1 "tsmsess" ) } )
, ((modm .|. controlMask, xK_1 ), do { windows (viewOnScreen 0 "doc1e" )
windows (viewOnScreen 1 "doc1d" ) } )
and 25 workspaces at the moment. Added four last week. :) My eventual goal is to roll up the variety of display patterns I've defined, and express them in a data structure. Once that's done, I can gridSelect any of them, and reserve the keystrokes for the really common ones. --- History I've been fiddling with X since the late 80s, and have messed with a variety of virtual-desktop memes; I used twm, vtwm, tvtwm and eventually settled on ctwm. Before ctwm, all of the virtual desktop schemes had some or another geometric idiom behind them. Windows were placed either according to a big root desktop you scrolled around on, or relative to your viewport. CTWM, on the other hand had 'workspaces', which are mostly analogous to xmonad workspaces, though different in detail and implementation. You named a family of workspaces, and then had 'occupation' directives which told you which X clients would be mapped when which workspaces were active. For years, I was happy with three X screens (e.g. .0, .1, .2). The one on the left was my 'commo' screen, and had (on different workspaces) various mail interfaces and IM clients. The one on the right was my 'web' screen, and had a variety of browsers (on different workspaces). In the center I had two TwinView-joined screens, as .0, and that was where my projects lived. I had 20 workspaces defined at the time I left that config. I actually peaked at 6 displays: I put our monitoring system on one of them, but couldn't figure out a rational use for screen 6. A co-worker suggested that, since it occluded my window, I could put a webcam out the window and display that as screen 6. :P If I were doing it again, screen 6 would be for my 'remote desktop' uses. - Allen S. Rout