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The root of my preferences lies in this need: as much space for _my_ application and as little as possible for the OS, but easily accessible when I need its functions, without running any occult desktop environments :)

Have you heard of tiling window managers? I use AwesomeWM myself; though I hear that i3 is really cool and the same for dwm and xmonad.

http://xmonad.org/ -- nuff said

Having long been a fan of minimalist window managers like Fluxbox, a friend recently recommended xmonad, which I promptly installed; and since doing so I have been amazed at how much time I can spend not managing windows.

There's apparently also osxmonad for the 'traitors,' but I haven't tried that out yet.

well, i hate to say this, but i dont use any of those. I use xmonad and have been all the better for it. I no longer have to cycle through windows or worry about resizing them. they just go where they are suppose to and if i need to have a couple ona desktop they can be switch to a different layout. http://xmonad.org/

I'm somewhat of a X desktop transient, switching between KDE, Gnome, and Xfce (variety is the spice of life, and all that rot).

I spend most of my days in Emacs or a term window, and I frankly don't use 90% of the features these desktop managers provide. After a few months with one of the "big three," I always come back to GNUstep. It's totally minimal, and you can do EVERYTHING without touching a mouse. It's as unobtrusive as possible.

Check the wikipedia here, or dig the GNUstep website.

Another option in the "totally minimal" world is xmonad, there's a lot to like here as well. Wikipedia: xmonad,

Or, try the Xmonad website

Lion has a different model. We can use that one as well.

instead mean dialog windows, I've never had this problem. An app in another Space will pop up an alert/error in its own Space and bounce the Dock icon. Works like a charm.

Not my experience at all. And things like "bring all to front" may not even expose the notification window.

As for the majority of your comment, you are intermixing: a network protocol and hardware abstraction layer (X), the windowing manager (not sure which ones you used), and the GUI (stuff like gconf). You original claim was about virtual desktop management on OSX vs. Unix. Virtual desktops on Unixes come well before there were any GUIs. Here is an example of configuring exactly what you are excited about from a window manager that is essentially unchanged for the last 18 years virtual desktops in window maker.

If you want to look at one that's more modern (only about 5 years old): x-monad tour.

Now the GUIs add additional levels. For example KDE has the notion of activity so you can tie applications dealing with specific data to windows. So for example a word processor opening files a particular directory can automatically different windows. That's beyond application configuration.

[configuration]... I want to enjoy using it. I don't want to tolerate it, and that's exactly what I have to do when I use Unix / X / Windows.

For enjoyment I don't think you can beat OSX. That is a different question than "most power". I may enjoy using OSX more, but OSX window managers don't hold a candle to modern tiling window managers, where each virtual desktop can have different window management behaviors. OSX barely even has behaviors that are configurable.

The most usable UIs I've used, in this regard, are tiling window managers:

* awesome, by far the best
* xmonad, a marginal second because
* ion, because he (as far as I can tell) started the idea in vogue, and did a good implementation. That, and he's a vitriolic asshole who deserves honorable mention.

They're usable almost solely with a keyboard, but a keyboard you do need. Throw a launcher on there, and it'd be the bee's knees for anything with a keyboard. I've used one of the above on 4" touchscreens up through multiple 30" monitors, and it scales quite well.

The backend is just catching up to Debian/yum, but the front end is way ahead.

The interfaces for Windows and OS X may be way ahead for people who point-and-click, but for people such as myself, whose fingers rarely leave the home row, window managers such as awesome and xmonad are way ahead of anything produced by Microsoft and Apple.

Have you ever put a web page and code side by side, splitting a wide screen monitor in half?

No, I put them top to bottom. That way, they both have the whole screen width to play with, no horizontal scrolling needed. It helps if you use a tiling window manager as that takes care of the tedious window positioning for you - I just press Alt-Spacebar to switch between top-bottom, left-right, left-stacked right, fullscreen and sometimes other layouts in Xmonad (on *nix, obviously).

UNITY, the great DIVIDER :)

Anyway, Real Men use Xmonad, dwm or Ratpoison. Me? I'm a bit of a wimp, so I use Openbox.

Also, Compiz by itself is a surprisingly capable window manager, for all of you who like your jiggly windows and desktop cubes.

There's a link to the Windows version of Divvy on the Mac Divvy page.

I use WinSplit Revolution, though. It's a free Window app that is similar to Divvy.

What I really wish I had, when I must use Windows, is a Windows version of xmonad. It has excellent support for arranging windows within large screens and on multiple monitors, once you get used to it.

What exactly IS that windows key for?

I don't know about Windows or Mac, but in Linux you can configure the windows key to be a extra mod key, kinda like Shift and Alt.

A lot of keyboard oriented windows managers (which I personally enjoy using) require that you press a certain key to activate the window manager's commands.
For example, Ctrl-t on Ratpoison or StumpWM or the Alt key on Xmonad. In those cases, you can use the windows key instead of those.

Or you can just learn emacs and start complaining that you need MORE keys on the keyboard

Well, some of us consider non-overlapping windows to be a feature, not a bug! well, this is a somewhat better implementation than Windows 1.0

I must say, it is beautiful now.

I have to agree, the feature set feels solid and the whole package a lot more mature.

One minor thing though, it seems to me that a lot of inspiration for UI look comes from the most recent Windows version at the time and inspiration for functionality from OS X. Nothing wrong implementing already working concepts but it would be nice to see what would come out from thinking more out of the box.
--
xmonad user

This is one of the front-page features of xmonad, which appears to be able to play with a desktop as well

This may not be exactly what you want, but you can actually run XMonad as the WM on top of KDE or GNOME. It comes with a configuration so you still have the Kicker wherever you put it. XMonad also can float arbitrary windows, either programmatically by their name or class, or manually by dragging them out of the tiles. I've been using XMonad for about three days, with KDE at work, and I like it tremendously; prior to this my only real experience with tiling WMs was with Ion/Pwm, which apparently intentionally does not support Xinerama in the core, though there is a plugin for it. Tuomo is about the whiniest programmer on the planet though. Something about Finnish programmers... ;)

Another thing to consider, though I'm not sure how doable this is in actuality, would be some kind of X proxy to launch your apps in, and then just run two X sessions, one for each display, and manually migrate them through the proxy when you need to. This, if it can be done, would be completely WM/DE agnostic.

This one looks promising too! (Just did a Google search for it, http://xmonad.org/ Guess I'll have to try them both...

http://www.xmonad.org/

When using Xinerama (which you really ought to be if you want control over your multi-screen setup), many tiling window managers can do all sorts of neat things. I personally use Awesome, although I'm told that xmonad is also good at this.

Probably the next development in the desktop UI will involve the elimination of the desktop abstraction itself. The user today spends too much time moving, resizing, bringing on front or back windows or finding icons and some projects have demonstrated how the user can gain a lot in productivity by using a different approach.

Almost all of my windows are maximised. No moving or resizing required. And I don't see how automatic tiling can reduce time spent on changing input focus between windows (bringing on front or back).

Probably the next development in the desktop UI will involve the elimination of the desktop abstraction itself. The user today spends too much time moving, resizing, bringing on front or back windows or finding icons and some projects have demonstrated how the user can gain a lot in productivity by using a different approach.

Luckily for us, xmonad substitutes time wasted rearranging windows with time wasted attempting to configure the window manager.

Probably the next development in the desktop UI will involve the elimination of the desktop abstraction itself. The user today spends too much time moving, resizing, bringing on front or back windows or finding icons and some projects have demonstrated how the user can gain a lot in productivity by using a different approach.

I'd like to take this opportunity to suggest that people try something exciting and different! The xmonad window manager!

It's a tiling-style wm like ion, ratpoison and dwm (in fact it started out as a reimplementation of dwm's features with the addition of xinerama support). xmonad is very small, very fast, very stable. Written in the Haskell programming language. And supported by a very helpful and friendly bunch on #xmonad at freenode.

Try this kind of window manager, you may just like it quite a bit more than the conventional model of dragging and sizing your life away. I went from fluxbox to xmonad last summer and use it on everything, period. It's that good.

Try xmonad. It's a tiling window manager, so it's a little different from what you'll be used to, but it seems to fit your description. It's worth playing around with, and I believe it is possible to integrate it into gnome and KDE.

It's called "tiling". And it's already been done, by Wirth's Oberon system, and the WM from Bell Lab's Plan 9. Mind you, they also had some prety idiosyncratic things about them, too. For something more X11 conventional (albeit written in Haskell) try Monad - http://xmonad.org/.

We, the doers of awesome, must come up with real world solutions to real world problems

You, the doers of awesome, have chosen an imperative programming language. That's why I prefer xmonad to solve a real world problem.

xmonad

No, no, no. XMonad is the expert mode widow manager. Mouse not required. Programming ability probably required, since all the settings are hard coded. Then again, it's tiny and easy to understand, so that's not a bad thing.

And XMonad is fast, stable, supports plenty, and very minimalistic. A mouse is not needed. The full source is ~16KiB.

Tens of thousands? Assuming you aren't exaggerating, it sounds like you should be scripting. Screw smooth workflow, even a "perfect" manual workflow is going to waste a second or two per image, and a few tens of thousands of seconds is a lot of time. If I had to do what you are doing, I would do it with GIMP and Script-Fu. One script that opens each image in turn and automatically opens each tool you listed in order, without my having to select anything. I could just pick the options for each tool, or cancel the ones I don't need (like horizon straighten) on a particular image. Such a script would take me (not a script-fu guru by any means) about an hour to write (3600 seconds), and save ~20000 seconds in your (probably exaggerated) situation.

PS: Don't blame photoshop for your window manager's poor focus model. Keyboard focus should never leave the image window (with one small exception, when you have a menu opened in one of the child windows, so your menu shortcut keys will work). Ditto people complaining about gimp child windows overlapping, another failure of either your WM or your workflow. If you can't grasp things like tiling and docking in a powerful WM, check out something trivially simple like http://xmonad.org/

I use the Windows key (aka 'mod4Mask') to control my tiling window manager. mod-number switches to workspace whatever, mod-h and mod-l resize windows, mod-a opens a terminal, mod-p opens program launcher. It's so much more productive, and I don't have to lose my Alt key to anything. Also, no mouse!

Let me second the sibling poster's objections, and add a few other points of my own: code posted in a forum may have been written by the poster on the spot, but if it compiles and works, in all likelihood he copied it from somewhere else himself. Lots of code sitting around on the internet (and discussed in forums) is GPL'd, and including 200 lines of GPL'd code in a closed source product will have your company in for a world of hurt if anyone ever finds out. People who write GPL'd software are... passionate.

Secondly, 200 lines of Java may not do much, but 200 lines of a denser language (like Haskell, for example) could be decidedly non-trivial. xmonad, a fully-featured tiling window manager for X11, is under 500 lines of code. Even if it's 200 lines of a sparse language, it may do something non-trivial and a fair use argument would fall flat on its face in that situation.

While I agree with your general feeling that our societies have become far too litigious, your solution seems to be to put your head in the sand and pretend that they haven't. Unfortunately, whether we like it or not, you can (and will, if anyone ever finds out) get sued for things like this.

Regardless of whether this registers as right or wrong on your personal moral compass, CYA dictates that you rewrite the code as quickly as possible and hope no one ever finds out.

xmonad is a tiling window manager in about 500 lines of Haskell code.

Features:

• Automatic window tiling and management
• First class keyboard support: a mouse is unnecessary
• Full multihead/Xinerama support
• XRandR support to rotate, add or remove monitors
• Per-workspace layout algorithms
• Per-screen non-built in status bars, with arbitrary geometry
• Dynamic restart/reconfigure preserving workspace state
• Tiny code base (~500 lines of Haskell)
• Fast, small and simple. No interpreters, no heavy extension languages

It's minimalistic, has everything I need with dmenu.

Oh, and it's very actively developed.