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Killing Clutter With The Antidesktop
Espectr0 writes "Hate window managers? Cannot live without one? Well, you can, kind of. A Freshmeat editorial called 'The Antidesktop' talks about how you can get rid of flashy, bloaty window managers without loosing functionality." It depends on how many tasks you want to keep track of in your head, too.
I think this guy is taking it too far. If you really want to avoid all bloat, you shouldn't run X anyway. Seems to me someone who doesn't like windowmanagers etc. should just run stuff from the console (and definately not Mozilla).
It's a good idea (disclaimer, I read the article a few hours ago). When I first started using vim (emacs now) my friends saw me use it for a few moments when looking over my shoulder. I did a key sequence, I don't recall what it was, and they actually said "whoa" and took a step back :) Advanced emacs usage has the same effect. If you're fast with the keyboard, this kind of thing can push efficiency through the roof.
This guy must have a good laugh at each GNOME/KDE flamewar ...
jim
I've wrestled with reality for 35 years and I'm happy to say, I finally won out - Elwood P. Dowd
Basically, a maximized emacs window with all the commands you can use without a mouse, and no bloat.
;)
I think that's the first time I've seen Emacs and no-bloat in the same sentence!
It's not the eden of windows managers, but what it DOES offer is the ability to manage every window on your desktop via the keyboard, it maximizes the amount of your desktop you get to use for working, yet still retains the ability to keep the mouse useful. It also offers rudimentary window managing features so those odd applications that refuse to cooperate can still be used (such as gimp).
I use it full time these days, it took me a couple days to get into the rhythm but now, considering using anything else is unthinkable.
I tried ratpoison, liked the philosophy, but it seemed to me it took the keyboard driven GUI philosophy way too far to be useful for an X session.
It can do tabbed windows, task switching, virtual desktops, keygrabbing (emacs style keybindings from all over your desktop) and so on. If you run it without a desktop, and if you have the Xscreensaver collection then you can run:
and get a beautiful animated dolphin as your "wallpaper". I think that's the command anyway, i'm at work so please correct me if wrong. If you're going to save CPU cycles in one way, you might as well spend them in another :)
Check out its home page here.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Its not quite an emacs window manager. The closest thing I've found the the emacs experience in the window manager arena is Ion It has the frames and minibuffer thing going for it.
My desktop at work is dual-head running several Ion frames, with emacs windows, xterms, and galeon windows. Its really all I need. If Emacs were to gain the ability to run graphical applications in emacs buffers similar to how it can currently run console apps, it would be the perfect window manager for what I (and I think a lot of other people here) want out of a desktop.
You can do fancier split screens to make several applications visible at once:
Anyone else notice how his "screen split" looks amazingly like what Desqview did back in the day for BBS consoles?
Good gravy, we've advanced to the point of reverting to 10 year old technology
--trb
Do not taunt Antidesktop...
Cheers,
Ian
I love X Window's flexibility in adding window managers. I also hate it because I never, ever get the same convenience and experience in navigating an operating system as I do with Mac OS X and Windows. KDE and GNOME have gone through great changes to make this easier, but they are desktop managers, not window managers. Nowandays the distinction is subtle, but significant when you're trying to pawn off Linux to your mom.
That said, while Mac OS X (my choice) doesn't use X (but can with the XDarwin OSS project), a user can get quite minimalistic even with Apple's OS X interface. For instance, unlike previous versions of the Mac OS, you don't have to show one damned icon, or even the dock, in Mac OS X. To do it:
1) From the Apple menu, choose Dock-->Turn Hiding On. This hides the dock until you move the mouse towards the dock's hidden location.
2) Click on the Finder button in the dock (or click on the desktop) and choose Preferences from the Finder menu. Uncheck the options under "Show these items on the Desktop." That rids you of any hard drive, removable media, or network drive icons.
3) Move any other document icons (the only things that can be left) into a folder in your Home folder, or elsewhere.
4) Change your desktop background to something pleasant.
The only thing left on the desktop now will be the menu bar.
Users who prefer to navigate their applications in a menu-centric style can create an alias (shortcut/symlink) of their Applications and Documents folders and place them in the dock. From there, users can just click on the folder and, ala the Start button or typical window manager menu, navigate through to the item they need.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
I use Windows 2000. My desktop is a mess of icons. I don't look at them, and I don't click on them either. I just hit Windows-D, type in the first couple of characters for the one I want, and press return.
For example, "i" launches Internet Exploer, "ou" launches Outlook, "ba" launches bash in cygwin, "v" launches vi... you get the picture. This has the advantage that anybody else can still use the computer.
For example, to type an email, I would do the following:
Windows-D
o (return)
CTRL-n
(to)
tab tab
(subject)
tab
(content)
CTRL-enter
... and the email is sent.
Command lines are all good and well, and I love bash to death, but don't knock GUIs if you're just using them wrong.
This is a good editorial. Its always good to see people thinking differently about how to do the things we all do on a daily basis.
However..
The notion of using a text-based backdrop to GUI applications certainly isn't a new idea, and its not without merit -- The only problem is, what the editorial discusses can be replicated in X, and represents a set of personal preferences, not something that would be inherently better than what you or I would make for ourselves.
For example, the layout of my own GUI has been relatively unchanged in the past 10 years, since thats how I like things. A large work area, bordered by a few shells down below, and a single line of information at the top that reflects system conditions. Take AmigaDOS 3.1's desktop, for example. It tells me everything I need to know at any given time using a single slat of text that not only doubles but *triples* as an information display, a File/Edit/View/Options bar, and a grab point for moving the screen up and down to expose screens beneath. Best of all, it conveys the same information a Dock would, but doesn't waste real-estate like a Dock would.
The problem with a Dock is that it it offers very little *useful* information for the real estate it encompasses. It also offers a wealth of information that isn't particularly useful to anyone. Most screenshots of desktops with Docks confirm this -- A comparably large piece of real estate is taken away from other applications for the purposes of eye candy. Big mistake.
Not to dismiss this guy's editorial, however, but he fails to distinguish how his method is any better or any different than simply running an xterm in the root window and simply utilizing pre-existing keyboard shortcuts for his applications.. (*shrug*)
Cheers
Bowie J. Poag
The following has been attributed to Dennis Ritchie and Bill Joy, but I seem to remember it being Rob Pike. When someone pointed out that X fills a much needed void:
"I have never seen anything fill up a vacuum so fast and still suck. --- Rob Pike, on X"
Also, Dennis Ritchie was said to have been heard saying:
"Steve Jobs said two years ago that X is brain-damaged and it will be gone in two years. He was half right."
...who "doesnt need a mouse" use Mozilla (or any other graphical web browser) for any length of time without the mouse, and be faster than anyone with one. While the keyboard certainly has its places, browsing the web certainly isn't one of them. There is a reason for all these insane web accessability standards everyone talks about yet no one follows, because navigating the web without a mouse is slow.
either "lose" or "loose."
Their spelling rules are as lose as a gose.
after reading the article a couple days ago, i thought i'd give these ideas a try. I'm a longtime screen user, and it's really changed the way i administrate and use *nix boxes. it's wonderful.
Once i got ratpoison going, i needed some other things to make it truly useful and comfortable:
this setup definately has some advantages: i'm not obsessing over the right KDE theme and color, there's no clutter at all on the screen, and, as a screen junkie, it just feels right.
there's a lot of bashing these ideas going on (at least right now) in this discussion, but i'd advise you to try it out for a while, particularly if you're a screen-keyboardy kind of person.
I don't know if i'll keep this setup or not. next step for me is to stop using mozilla and play around with phoenix instead. but, with today's earlier story of the cool new stuff coming in KDE3.1 this experiment, though useful, might be short-lived.
For the sake of continuity (and gratuitous attempt at scoring a few karmasnacks), here's my setup:
My $HOME/.ratpoisonrc:
My $HOME/.keylaunchrc:
What i have right now feels like gnu screen for X, which is a marvelous thing, right now, for me. My opinion will most likely change in the future, as i have yet to find the setup that's perfect. At least with X i have a choice. But so far, i'm optimistic. Not bad. Not bad at all.
Well, people will chime in and tell you that the Display Postscript / Display PDF display technologies and accompanying API's are a GUI solution for UNIX. While both NeXTStep and MacOS X look great, their windowing systems come with a significant loss in features; in particular, they are not network transparent.
... but I think there are projects out there trying to resolve this.
... look at the source of any Motif-using app and you'll see). Although, nowadays with projects like gnome, kde, tcl/tk, perl's gui hooks, etc ... it is almost trivially easy to code complex UI's for X.
I think most criticisms for X stem from the following reasons:
+ Adding fonts to X is, simply put, an absolute nightmare. Last I checked, it involves copy files to a directory, manually editing a text file, restarting your "font server", and other crap. This is just not acceptable
+ Back in the old days, writing apps for X was a nightmare. The low level drawing API that comes with X, called XLib, has more to do with drawing primitives like lines than with drawing and managing buttons, text fields, etc. AFAIK, the only decent API available for writing apps was Motif, which was only available commercially (note that many programmers will disagree with me that Motif is "decent" -- in fact, it is apparently a huge pain in the ass
+ XFree86 is a nightmare to configure. While Redhat does all kinds of fancy stuff to autodetect your video card/monitor, I tried Debian a few days ago and gasped at how little has changed in configuring XFree86 since 7 years ago. With a nervous laugh, I noticed that same line in xfree86config where you have to input your vertical/horizontal frequency ranges, and it warns you about how it might destroy your monitor. Aahhhh, fond memories of that very same config step that struck the fear of God in me as I installed Slackware for the first time when I was just a little tyke.
Fortunately, most of the above is being worked on. Despite all that I've said, I am an ardent X supporter. Its out of the box network transparency is a massive, let me repeat that, massive feature for anyone but the strict home user who only uses a browser and a chat program or two. Academic, scientist, programmer, administrator, office worker -- millions of professionals rely on X's network transparency every single day. No need to use/buy expensive, bulky, slow VNC clients or proprietary terminal servers. This is precisely why X is not going anywhere anytime soon.
I'm surprised noone mentioned splitvt at all. I use this in combination with screen when I want to group logical windows on one screen(the program) screen.
You can check it out here.
It only has three keybindings and includes a ^O for command mode that allows you to resize the windows.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
I wanted the same thing with Windows 2000 at work, but it wouldn't let me. I came close by opening my Display control panel and, under the "Effects" tab, replaced all my desktop icons with the tiny shortcut arrow. (I suppose I could have found an icon file which was completely blank, but I haven't bothered yet.)
All that was left was the text and those tiny icons, which I arranged in a single row and gave a silver background color in the "Appearance" tab. I then set my desktop background image to a screengrab of my code editor.
Now, whenever the boss is coming while I'm busy playing "Bejeweled", I just hit Win-D to hide all open windows, and casual passers-by think I'm terribly busy working on something very difficult.
Unfortunately, I was called away to an emergency at Kuro5hin. I told ThenOrThanBoy to keep an eye on things in my absence, but frankly I am beginning to doubt his commitment to the Cause.
It's hard to find good minions these days.
Proudly correcting Slashdot's most irritating linguistic error since 2002.
"The mime's opinion was a mute point."
Well, that goes without saying.
You just described a command-line interface. With the added feature that the ability to type the command requires you to clutter your desktop with icons that you will not click on. Brilliant.