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How Many Windows?
youthoftoday asks: "As part of a recent piece of coursework (I'm a student) I talked to a number of people about how many windows they typically have open at any one time. I received a startling range of responses, and that got me thinking about what people consider a 'normal' working environment in terms of the number of windows they have open and what they like to get done. I usually have about 25 windows open and about 15 tabs in my browser (over two monitors) as a standard working environment in Mac OS X. I usually keep a set of windows in position for about 5 days between restarts. Others prefer to close windows for applications they're not using right at this minute. And we all know people who are scared to have more than one window open. So, how do Slashdot readers use their OSes?"
5 days between restarts? Yeesh, I'm glad I don't pay this guy's electricity bills. Call me crazy, but I shut my machine down when I'm not using it (mostly because the awesome fan power would keep me awake).
As for windows, typically about 5+ tabs (I seriously saw FF 2.0 hit 700K of memory the other night when I opened about 20 tabs, wish I'd grabbed a screenshot) and around 4 or so windows, including IM stuff. I wish Windows had a feature like Fedora's multiple desktop stuff with the 4 thumbnails, as this would help me split stuff up better since half my taskbar is taken up with quick launch shortcuts or status bar icons I need on display.
At work I typically have 8-10 open as the computer is fairly crappy.
At home when I am doing misc stuff I'll generally have 20+ with some browser tabs and IE windows (FF and IE)
If I'm searching for porn..usually 50+
Since this is for school you can tell them computer parts or something instead of porn I guess..
Hmm; let's see. Right now: Opera, four tabs; one is my office's bb2.html. Firefox; tab count varies depending on what I'm doing; two right now. Thunderbird. xplorer2; one pane, two tabs right now. ActionOutline. iTunes. PuTTY; with nine screens on the far side. Two OneNote 2007 notes that need to be filed. And I'm writing this in Papyrus.
That's ten windows, scattered across my laptop's display and a 19" flat panel, running Windows XP.
How many Windows are in your house?
... things minimised to the system tray? Because I prefer to keep a lot of stuff down there, out of the way.
I've usually got 5 or 6 (8 at most) windows open, spread through 4 virtual desktops. Browser, file manager, console (though yakuake: http://yakuake.uv.ro/ has alleviated that need), IM stuff, a game of tetris, and maybe email.
Anyone else think the comments just weren't rendering right before they turned off ABP and saw ads?
Eight windows. Most of these are applications I'm actively using. This enables switching between code, documentation and my test environments.
Suggestion to the editors: this might have been more useful as a Slashdot Poll rather than an Ask Slashdot.
Honesty. Loyalty. Kindness. Laughter. Generosity. Magic!
At work, I usually just have Eudora, Winamp, and Firefox open. I close them all when I leave (my mobo has bad capacitors and likes to turn itself off at night sometimes).
Let's see:
1 Firefox (1 tab, which is this one)
1 mIRC (5 channels)
2 AIM (list + away message)
1 Winamp
1 MP3 folder
1 Word document
Total = 7.
In general, I tend to have only one window open at a given time. I may, however, have several programs running. My typical day at work has Dev-C++, MPLab, Firefox, and other miscellaneous things going on that I peruse regularly. This is all on a Windows XP machine. At home it tends to be the same. Only one window open at a time. Usually its only Firefox or Konqueror running and the occasional Terminal. (obviously I am running Linux) I only have one window open at a time beause I like my work spread out in front of me, especially when working with very small parts (Microchip assembly code, for example) and I have to have a great sense of awareness about my work. Most of the time, the status bar takes up much of the on-screen real estate, so I dont like to have more than one window on screen at a time simply because for every screen you add, you get much less space in your owrking environment.
Laptop: Firefox with 6 tabs, jEdit, terminal, Gaim in systray, Quod Libet (music) in systray, and yakuake (a command shell) hidden most of the time. Office: Firefox with 7 tabs, Eclipse, Evolution, Gaim in systray, yakuake. And to think, my office box has 2 monitors :P
If I am doing web work, say writing some PHP or HTML, I generally have:
- Window for previewing/testing the website
- Window for editing the source files (I use HAPedit a lot for editing)
- Window for showing the source files on my HDD
- Window for FTP to server to upload files from my HDD
- Window for surfing the internet to do research/learn about PHP etc (this is consistent)
- Window for music (I suppose winamp counts as a window)
- Window for graphics design
To be honest, I can't begin to understand how you would need 25 windows... Unless you are counting tabs within programs like Dreamweaver.. I can understand that you would want to leave browser windows open when you find useful resources, like PHP function description pages for functions you use often.. But 25 still seems fairly high to me.
I find that simple is better when I work. I try not to clutter my workspace and I feel that things move more smoothly.
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
I find it more interesting to ask how many virtual desktops people have (but of course that only applies to Linux) and how they use them. Window counts may vary, but virtual desktop usage is informative.
For me, the answer is 5, organised as follows:
1: Playground, this has browser, music player, the odd game and so on it.
2: Mail. Yes, an entire desktop dedicated just to the mail client, I don't know why, but I got used to it.
3. Documents. This is where Lyx, Kile, Jabref, OpenOffice, Acroread and so on will open up.
4 + 5: Development. Specifically, 4 has the Editor, several consoles and the Matlab command window. 5 has the odd help browser and the Matlab Workspace on it.
So in terms of Windows, not counting random consoles, that's about 2 + 1 + 3 + 5 + 2 = 13 on a normal day.
I find it distracts me to have too many open windows. Right now, just surfing and wasting time, there are 11, some of them minimized, on two 19" displays, their respective machines being connected via synergy.
When I'm programming, it's usually KDevelop full screen on one display and some misc stuff on the other, like Konsole, chat application and mail.
Oh, and there's the notebook... Nearly forgot. It only has Outlook open mostly, the only reason I need a Windows machine around. *sigh*
This would have been a perfect poll, BTW.
Otherwise, 1-5 apps, 2-10 browser windows, with 1-5 tabs in each browser window. My habits.
Some people I know had 50+ windows (IE 5 or 6?), but that was before tabbed browsing. Yes, and we never turned off those computer when leaving work. In fact it was considered bad for the pc:s (Wndows NT 4.0) to turn them on and off. If you had had to them off the broweser habit of that guy probably would have been different.
I always have at least 10 separate windows open (many more if you consider each open session within screen distinct), but I usually average closer to 15 or 20. Konqueror is one of my omnipresent applications and I frequently queue things up in new tabs that I mean to get to eventually (often I'll have tabs open for weeks or months at a time that I haven't looked at yet). Within Konqueror, I have a minimum of 3 tabs open, though frequently more, I'm not sure about an average there.
Also, what about multiple computers? I work across several computers and each has it's own set of different applications open at any given time. I was only counting my primary computer above, but if you count all of them, the numbers above would be roughly tripled.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
Often I just have firefox XOR a terminal open, sometimes both. But that's not quite fair. By windows do you mean applications? Because I have, lets see, two screen sessions, four konqueror instances running in one "window", kopete, akregator, amarok, kmail and ktorrent running as icons in the system tray (they notify me when something interesting happens, no need to keep them out clogging precious information space), xplanet, conky, yakuake and a bunch of shit that run as background processes but which I am still actively interested in.
So one window, hundreds of applications. I'm usually interacting with fifty different programs, but is that what you're shooting for?
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
I must not be geeky enough. At work, right now I have 3 windows open and 3 tabs in Firefox. I'm not a programmer right now, but when I was I would probably have maybe, 5-6 windows open (but within those windows there would be multiple tabs open).
I can't imagine having 25 separate windows open... even spread over virtual desktops, that's just too much clutter for me.
Treat every day like it's your last; delete your browser cache before going to bed.
I find having a great deal of windows (or tabs) open counterproductive - I get lost, confused about what I was doing and can't concentrate.
I'm always shocked by how many people do have open, like seeing someones FF with 20-30+ tabs up. Are there really ever 30 essential pages that need to be up right now?
Promote Charity on Myspace, Show Your Colours!
Just kidding. MOre liek forty million billion>
Number of windows isn't a great metric, really. You need to really count number of tabs or files open in the editor, I think. Rather than open a new instance of Xemacs for each file, I have one instance running on each machine I'm logged into. I have four xterms open on my Linux box and the have a total of 25 separate tabs going, all of which are being used. Those four instances are on three machines, by the way. I got so many open on my local workstation that I need a two instances to hold them all reasonably. I have around 30 files open to edit, and typically three to six tabs in Firefox. (I try to keep it pared down to three, but it balloons up when I'm working with lots of pages.) Also, a number of applications have multiple windows but really aren't any more interesting than multiple tabs. For example, are the different chat windows in Trillian really different from the different tabs in Gaim?
13 terminal windows,1 tabbed conversation window, two browser windows with some number of tabs, an evolution window with mailbox, a compose evolution window, a sharkwire window, the gaim buddy list, the gaim account window (by chance) and a source view window.
Total of 23 windows on current workspace.
I have two more windows (openoffice writer and yet another browser window) on another workspace.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I usually have 10-15 windows open, including IMs and such. Normally about 3-4 browser windows with anything from 3 tabs to about 40.
When i've been using my computer for an hour, and I have my IDE open, I use up about 1gb of ram, give or take...
Move sig!
Usually, Trillian, MIRC, Firefox (w/ tabs), Outlook, and Itunes.
Well, right now I have about 40 windows open if you include IM and an mp3 player. This is probably a bit less than usual as I don't have any SSH sessions currently open. I do have 3 remote desktop sessions running, each with 2 or 3 additional windows running within them.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Usually four or five, but every so often my window usage "bursts" and I end up with 10 to 15 tabs open. I can say similar things about the number of tabs I have open in Firefox as well. I think that the number of windows open at once may express a user's multitasking preference in general, so I wouldn't be surprised to find other people with about 1:1 ratios of both.
No.. there are FIVE!
I have 9 windows open right now, if you count my adium buddy list. 5 Firefox, each with 4-8 tabs, adium buddy list, and two finder windows left over from reorganizing my bit torrent DL folder last night. Usually in addition to that I have my azerus client open, a chat window open, and the VLC control box + paused video. Maybe iTunes. I'd probably have other crap open like calculator, 2-3 terminal windows, cpu monitor & image capture running in the background if my other monitor wasn't plugged in to my ubuntu box at the moment.
He might go 5 days between reboots, but typically I go 30-45 days between reboots; I just sleep the computer in the mean time. Plus it's a laptop, which consumes almost zero energy compared to a desktop.
moox. for a new generation.
I usually have 15-20 windows open (browser, mail, IRC, IDE, half a dozen commandlines, mediaplayer, a couple of text editors, one or two file system browsers, sometimes a task-specific program such as an image editor or a pdf viewer, and often two or three additional browsers for testing). When I get above 20 windows, I start to lose track and go through my commandlines and text editors to close unused ones. My main browser usually has ~10-15 tabs open that I'm actively working in, although can easily have 40+ tabs open when I'm specifically searching, reading webbased mailinglist conversations, etc. Sometimes I use two windows for my main browser, one work-specific, one for other things, but this is rare, and usually the separation doesn't last long. About half the windows are full screen (1680x1050) to remove the sense of clutter; mostly it's utility windows that aren't (text editors, file system browsers, commandlines).
25? Geez...
Right now I have one browser window/tab open and Mail open in the background. That's all.
I like tabs, but only for flipping back and forth quickly between a few web pages. Why on earth would you need to be actively switching between 25 different things? Are you that good at multitasking?
Don't fool yourself: you're just not closing things that you don't need. I bet there's a million icons on your desktop that could be better stored in other directories. Organize!
I don't think "number of windows open" is as relevant as how you organise what's loaded... things like media players sit quite happily aside as icons along with temperature readouts, email notification, etc.
When writing I've usually got a browser, filer window, thumbnail browser, text editor and FTP client "open" (but only one maximised at a time -- never been able to get to grips with lots of windows on top of each other, personally, despite growing up with RISC OS) with email, music and a dictionary app to one side and in occasional use. Throw in a couple of launch icons and a few hotkeys and everything's not far away. Browser tabs? Anywhere between one and twenty plus.
Also important is whether applications save their state when closed -- browsers and editors in particular -- and what window handling you're using (taskbar, some items sidelined to a separate menu, etc.)
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
I configure it to create a seperate window for every person I talk to then just leave em open so I can see what we talked about last time I spoke to that person without having to go look through the log. Take them away and I have about 5 or 6 other windows open, on each of my four monitors.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Generally, anywhere from just one (running Flight Sim X) to an average of three or four (surfing, email client in the background, etc) to perhaps a dozen. Generally, once the taskbar grows its own scroll widget, it's time to clean for me.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
2 monitors. About 15 open windows, many of which are tabbed internally. Usually I have 5 txt / config files open in one app, and 7-10 tabs in Opera.
Opera (browser), Crimson Editor (text), Two e-mail applications, Perforce (version control), an internal development application, usually three copies of Word, one of Excel, a calculator, a copy of the game, a controlling window for said game, something playing music, Photoshop, Palm Desktop, Skype, Trillian. Sometimes add in Illustrator, sometimes add in VC++, sometimes CuBase or Audacity.
The ______ Agenda
You should have exactly three windows open. One is Firefox with multiple tabs. The next, Emacs with several buffers and perhaps several Emacs 'windows'. The third, a terminal program with tabs, or at your option, xterm plus GNU screen for terminal multiplexing.
.xsession. If you need a window manager you can start one later from inside Emacs, and kill it when you no longer need it.
OTOH, if you have just one window and do everything inside Emacs or XEmacs, you can eliminate window managers too and just run xemacs full-screen (fiddle with the -geometry option) straight from your
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Right now I have 16 different windows. But two of those are IDEs with lots of opened files in tabs; one is a text editor with 9 files in tabs; and, of course, there is Firefox with 27 tabs (thanks God for the improved tab management in Firefox 2.0).
I also keep windows in the same place for days between log-offs.
-- SouNerd.com
I'm sure since i'm replying to the main body of the article, this will never even be read, but here it goes
I'm an OSX & Firefox user. Under heavy use my macbook will have 3-5 tabbed browser windows each with 10-20 tabs each. On top of that, i'd be running adium, itunes, textmate with 3-4 projects open at once, preview w/ 4-12 documents open, a couple terminal windows open, and usually 4 finder windows open.
So, a whole lot, so probably upwards of 20 actual windows, and numerous tabs in a number of them.
There are lives at stake here!
KDX Client 5 windows
Finder 2
Safari 6 with about 15 tabs open in each window
iTunes 2 (main and EQ)
TextEdit 6
Jomic 1
Smultron 1
Mail.app 2 (main and Activity Viewer)
It seems any app that is multi-document aware should be able to handle a tabbed or list interface to minimize the number of windows it uses.
I run a Laptop with 2 Gig of memory... and I try to never shutdown... but Windows, uh, usually forces me to reboot about every 23 days (*sigh* wish I could have Linux on this laptop)... I do, however, hibernate the laptop alot, so thats why my uptime is particularly high (IMHO) for my (ab)use.
As far as windows, at any given time, I have 4-5 Wordpads open, 4-5 notepads open, 1-3 command prompts open, including some using BASH from Cygwin., 3-10 (sometimes as high as 15 or 20) PuTTY windows open, Itunes, Outlook, Excel and/or Word, 1-2 of IE, 1-2 of Flock, 1-5 of Opera and 20-40 copies of Firefox running.
Hope you found that interesting.
I tend to be very focused on whatever I do, which seriously effects the amount of windows I have open, especially on Windows machines. Typically on a Windows machine, I'll have 1-3 windows open. Firefox is always open, it only closes when I have to reboot. Other than that, I might have an IM window open if I'm talking with someone, and maybe iTunes. On Linux however, because I can switch between desktops, I might have as many as 6-8 windows open. Firefox (for normal browsing) and Rhythmbox are usually open in one desktop, and Firefox (research) and OOo for papers I'm writing in another, and random other stuff (GIMP usually) open in another.
I try to keep as few windows open as possible.
Whenever I'm doing any design work, I tend to have a few windows open. These include an ftp client, firefox, dreamweaver, photoshop and googletalk to talk to people i'm working with. I close all conversations as soon as I've said what I want to and if I remember, close all tabs I'm not using.
Due to myself forgetting, I normally end up with 10 windows open. Lots of conversations. Multiple explorer windows.
Firefox usually has a few. Whenever doing web based stuff, it's normally lots of tabs with the same thing in.
Multiple windows aren't normally a problem, due to the magical "show desktop" button.
My desktops have slowly, but surely, converged into one screen session.
0: stuff: Just a standard shell, yeah.
1: emacs: Text editing. Usually about eight buffers open, depending on what I'm doing.
2: irc: I'm always using irssi, productivity drainer of our time.
3: songs: ncmpc gives me music.
Other than that, there are usually two or three other windows open, again depending on what I'm doing. Usually, they are terminals. I also have both a web browser and Gaim open, neither of which translate very well to a terminal.
That said, I am very picky about windows, and judging by the comments that I have seen so far, no-one is being kind to the window pushers. Emacs buffers get killed if I'm not using them, or haven't used them for a while (half an hour or so). I have the annoying habit of closing chat windows, making searching in the logs quite annoying. Terminals usually get opened for one particular purpose, then I close them again straight after.
I hope I haven't failed some sort of test, that would be awful.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
i keep one linux user for each thing i'm doing, so firefox history preferences toolbar buttons and history are easier to navigate. Usually it's four users open, at least two windows per user. Development user has the sticky window (appears in all workspaces, or virtual screens) and one tworkspace for the IDE another for the doc and the database apps. I'm typing from the last workspace which is for "recreational activities", be it games, porn, slashdot...
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Virtual desktop 1:
Thunderbird
J-Pilot
FireFox (3-50 tabs)
Virtual desktop 2:
6-8 terminal sessions (dev/admin - multiple machines)
Virtual desktop 4/5:
More terminal sessions constantly tailing logs for quick system checks
Virtual desktops 3/6:
Available for word-processing, image editing, or whatever misc task I need at the moment.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Right now on my work PC I have 9 windows open. My browser has 2 tabs open, and Visual Studio has 1 tab. Typically, I'll have 1-3 browser open with about 5 tabs each, 7-18 tabs in Visual Studio, and 2-5 Explorer (file system) windows open.
I try to close Word documents, Powerpoint presentations, and Excel spreadsheets when I no longer need them so I can save memory.
On my personal PCs I keep much less open. This is because I primarily use them for email. When I do serious computing at home, my personal environment reflects my work environment.
No, I will not work for your startup
I tend to have my main desktop in front of me and a laptop to my side so I can easily work on both. On my Linux desktop I have four virt terminals which each have dedicated tasks (1; web, active chat, current work 2; chat user lists and reference lists (phone numbers, address books) 3; email 4; possibly illegal torrent operations and anything of that nature) and I try to keep as much tabbed as possible. Then to my left on my Mac laptop I tend to just have the one desktop filled with everything (F11 under expose` is awesome) including more chat, mostly work, and basically a clone of the applications on my Linux box (this allows me to pickup my mac and go roaming while continuing what I'm doing in real time). Both boxes have extra tasks that each one carries out and the other can't do.
:) ...Some times the ease of multitasking under Unix can be a curse.
In total I have around 80 windows open at any one time over the two computers; plus tabs in ffox, im, and xchat.
I ate your fish.
I've gotten so used to virtual desktops, it's really ideal. It's a feature I just can't believe is still not built into Windows or OS X. But under Windows I now always install VirtuaWin right away and use it constantly. I set it up to switch between desktops with Alt-Ctrl-Left and Alt-Ctrl-Right. Under OS X there is a program called Desktop Manager that does the same thing, but with pretty switching effects. :)
Seriously, I got hooked on using multiple desktops under Linux and I can't go back. It's one of the few GUI "features" I honestly feel has increased my productivity. Right up there with the mouse scroll wheel. I can't believe I lived without it for so long back in the Windows 2000/98 days. And to think that it's been on Unix/Linux for years without being "copied" yet! (By the first party vendor, that is.)
To answer the original question, I usually about 1 or 2 windows open per desktop, with 4 desktops configured. But it depends what I'm doing. I am one of those "close it when I'm done" kind of people, but memory caching does wonders... starting up FireFox after it's been closed is quite quick, no matter what operating system you're using.
Please define Window. Does that mean an actual movable-on-the-desktop rectangular entity, or an application?
For example, does each tab in Firefox count? They are potentially conceptually different subjects, so my brain has to keep track of them separately.
How about photo editing tools (The GIMP, etc): each image opens in a different window, plus tools within the application open in different windows (Layers, etc). I can have 5 on-screen windows open to edit 1 image, or 6 windows to edit 5 files, etc.
How about in the terminal window: I can have multiple tabs, and each tab can be running screen, each with multiple sessions, and each session can have background tasks. Should these be counted as windows?
I can also run daemons or other interactively-started processes that don't have any windows, but they are definitely running. Should these be counted?
Let's see, there are currently 5 here open on my laptop. My work computer, right next to me, currently has 19, including two browsers windows with 6 tabs, 4 development environments (which is fewer then usual, and half of which are database management), then 4 folder shells, two windows for IMs (tabbed IMs help) and one for music, and one for mail of course. The home non-server computer is usually similar, only more browsers and fewer dev environments. Why is it that I never want to reboot my computer? Because it takes forever to get all those windows back open. Even when I was running linux and it would open most of them back up for me, it was a pain.
I usually have 10-15 windows open, distributed over 2 workspaces (in GNOME). An instance of Firefox for each workspace, bluefish, OO Writer, emacs, the file manager (Nautilus in my case), a plain text editor (gedit), and 3-5 terminals.
My work machine has 14 windows, including two firefox windows with a total of 26 tabs. That's spread across two virtual desktops on a dual-head machine with two 1280x1024 monitors, running Gentoo. My other work machine is a single-head setup, and I've got four virtual desktops, and about the same number of windows.
On my home system (also Gentoo with the same dual-head setup), I've currently got ten windows and a measly 7 firefox tabs (usually there's another two ff windows each with a dozen or so tabs).
I restart when there's a power outage, or when a software update requires my desktop environment to be restarted anyway (e.g., if I have to update something pretty fundamental (like GTK for instance) because an application update that I want requires a new version of it). This can be several months, potentially.
It's annoying to have to close all of my windows, because I lose track of everything I was in the middle of.
Windows I leave open for weeks or months at a time include:
* Typically about three Emacs windows: one for Gnus and one for each relevant major project I'm in the middle of.
* Several gnome-terminal windows: one regular one for miscellaneous stuff, one root terminal for administrative stuff (such as doing a portupgrade -- that in itself can take a couple of weeks), and usually a couple of others related to projects I'm in the middle of (e.g., if I'm doing a dev project that involves a database, there'll be one for the db console; if I'm doing a web dev project, there'll be one tailing the error log; and so forth).
* One Firefox window, with a number of tabs.
* OpenOffice.org will almost always have at least one window open. Often this will be my financial spreadsheet, or if nothing else I'll leave the last-used thing open to keep the app in memory so I don't have to wait for it to load next time I need it.
* xmms
* do my two panels count as windows?
That's just the stuff I practically never close. At any given time I typically have several other windows open, sometimes for up to several days at a time.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Let's see... I generally have anywhere from 30-65 spread across 2 KVM'ed machines, 3 VNC desktops, and 1 RDC connection. Sometimes it's enough to drive a person to want to move into the forest and become a "back to the land" hippie.
2x Heads (no Xinerama)
- Head 1 -
19x Eterm's (SSH to various servers, etc)
1x TSClient
1x Citrix ICA Client
1x XMMS
1x Firefox with 10 open tabs
This is spread across 4 Virtual Desktops
- Head 2 -
14x Eterm's (SSH to various servers, IRC, etc)
1x TSClient
1x GEdit
1x Firefox with 3 open tabs (right now)
This is also spread across 4 Virtual Desktops
In God We Trust, Everyone else must have an X.509 certificate.
On my MacBook (1.83GHz Core Duo with 512MB RAM), I usually have the following applications open:
Depending on the task on hand, I may have a word processor, text editor, some X terminals and X11 applications (via a SSH tunnel to a school account where I do my CSC homework), iCal, or TeXShop open.
I also notice that the amount of windows that I have open is proportional to the speed and performance of the computer that I'm using. For example, when I was using my Duron 950MHz with 384MB RAM and either Windows XP or FreeBSD, I normally only had my web browser (Firefox or Konqueror), GAIM, my email client (Thunderbird or Kontact), and (on Windows) iTunes opened, and sometimes some terminals opened whenever I was doing CSC homework. I would run almost as many windows on that machine as my Mac, but I would be a bit more cautious about performance. On my 266MHz Pentium II laptop with 64MB RAM running FreeBSD, I normally stick to just one application (usually my web browser, Opera, and even that one application can be demanding. (Running some X terminals, gvim, Opera, GAIM, and another GTK app on that machine is an exercise of patience whenever switching between applications, and I couldn't even begin describing the horrors of using OpenOffice on that machine).
Innovations such as Expose and (on KDE and WindowMaker, the desktops that I used on my BSD machines) virtual desktops make using multiple windows much easier. I tried not to have more than 4 or 5 windows opened on my non-Mac machines because there is no easy way of finding all of them (although virtual desktops do help with organizing categories of windows). Because of Expose, I am able to have up to 15 windows on my screen (I've worked with that many windows once) on my Mac and still work very efficiently and be productive without being lost. Bringing virtual desktops to OS X (something that I miss from my BSD experience) and giving virtual desktops the power of Expose will make my Mac even better to use.
Once upon a time, I would have answered 3.1. Later I would've said 95-98. But lately, my answer is X windows.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I just hit F9 and counted.. I have 20 windows open at the moment, four of which are browser windows with multiple tabs. (3-10 tabs each) six windows on my left monitor, 14 on the right the left monitor tends to have stuff that is always open in the background.. (iChat and iTunes and such) the right is where I have the windows which I'm actively using (terminals, browsers, editors)
-- Tim Buchheim
I'm an IT Manager and I have a Parhelia triple-head system (3840x1024). Seven of the windows are for a database app that spawns new windows, rather than having some sort of parent window where everything loads. I have quite a number of Windows Explorer windows open that I'd probably close more often if I didn't have as much screen realestate. During peak times I typically add another five windows, on average.
.... argue money. That always gets people interested.
Do you realize that an average 300+ watt machine running 24/7 costs you about $15-$20 a month in electricity?
If you don't believe me get a power usage meter.
You're basically paying $20 a month for the privilege of contributing to Folding@home or whatever. You're trying to say that money wouldn't do more good being given to your local food bank or something?
No thanks.
Well, I have two machines that are set up differently. The first is my desktop, which has two 1600x1200 LCDs attached to it. I generally have e-mail open, a web browser window (and a few tabs in it) a file manager window (also with tabs, I use Konqueror) and then whatever apps I am using. Usually that is a word processor and a spreadsheet or OpenOffice Impress and the GIMP and a picture viewer. I tend to prefer tabs rather than multiple windows, so each app has just one window and I'll have 3-6 windows open.
When I'm using my laptop, I'll have the e-mail and file manager open again (same OS as the desktop- Gentoo) and whatever I'm working on. Since the laptop does not have all that big of a screen, I set up AIGLX and Beryl to have the spinning cube deal.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
*flexes his mouse muscle*
well lets see here I have 17 windows opened for various ajax, java, c++ and other misc nerdy work I'm doing. I have no less than 8 different browsers open at any given time, currently opera with 8 tabs, firefox with 6, IE7 with 9 different tabs, Netscape, Lynx, and a couple other browsers each have one. Mozilla has 47 as I'm currently doing uh..research.
I'm also defragging my torrents which requires another 4 windows, and I'm writing this slashdot entry through a special program I wrote which opens a tab for every sentence. All this on my custom built (I poured the plastic myself when I was 3) 36 inch desktop ultra super flat LCD.
Asking a "who has more" question on slashdot is inviting a nerd flexing contest.
Today is kinda light. I'd estimate that I'm normally at more like 40 windows with about 20 tabs spread across 5 browswers.
I'm interested in some way of saving the windows that I have open so that I can have all those programs open on command. It'd help for switching between different programming environments that use different programs, file paths, etc.
On a "normal" workday I have about 70 windows open average, 60 minimum (8-monitor setup) on my primary work box... That is one window to keep an eye on the stats for every server I manage (remotely and locally.) There are also additional windows for FF (avg 5 tabs,) Putty, IE (MY Uninterpretable Power Supply power management system only works right in IE,) Office (mood reflects whether it is OpenOffice or Microshaft Office) VB.net, command prompt and Remote desktop (more often than not to home.) If it is a lax day I will usually also have Trillian open. Of course, I rarely look at more than 3-4 windows at a time, I still have them open to glance at throughout the day.
For the record, the only time my computer has been restarted (never shut down) in the past month is for monthly Windows updates. That is the only time it ever restarts or logs off (lock is your friend.)
Just my daily routine window-wise.
Erutangis ym si siht.
Seriously, why?
Ha, maybe the capatcha answers my question...
It's "artwork".
Usually only what I am working on, but maybe 1 or 2 FF windows with 1-3 tabs each, Trillian,and Itunes and/or Photoshop...MAX.
Right now, at this moment, having stumbled across this question...
On my Debian Sarge box running Gnome:
21 windows open on two virtual desktops (of 8 available);
- 3 are firefox, one with 11 tabs, one with 3 tabs, one with 1 tab;
- 11 are terminals, all but one ssh'd to one of two remote machines;
- 2 are remote desktops, one VNC and one Remote Desktop;
- 1 is a text editor, which itself has 5 tabs open.
- 2 are spreadsheets, one with 3 tabs and one with 12 tabs.
100% memory in use, 53% in cache, haven't rebooted the machine in a month, no swap space in use. Every single window on the screen was launched today (started the day with a blank desktop on all 8 virtual desktops); every tab was opened manually (no auto-opening tabs.)
I have a 12 inch powerbook (1024x768) so I only see a couple at a time. I just tab between applications and use Expose. It makes it really easy (and fast!) to go to recently used documents and applications by just leaving them open. I have 15 applications open right now. I only really close windows or quit applications when my computer starts running too slow (fairly frequently :)).
I'm probably on the far side of the issue as I use Enlightenment-0.16 on Linux and have 3 multiple desktops with 12 virtual desktops in each. In those 36 desktops I usually have 5+ browser windows with anywhere from 1-30 tabs in each. I once counted over 200 tabs open before I got irritated and started closing them. I have one desktop for music with a player, mixer, and file-broswer in it. Another desktop to monitor the logs, and another for email. If I'm coding I have the development desktop, another desktop to compile/run the program in and possibly a third to debug it. I could also have a few desktops open with documentation to assist me. I just checked and I have 41 terminals opened most I'm done with but never closed. It all breaks down to memory available; until the machine starts to slow down I don't go closing windows. It helps when my machine is up for an average of a month between reboots. (39 days currently with only about 3 unused desktops) Needless to say, it takes quite a bit of time for me to reboot my machine and when X starts it starts 19 windows before it ever gives me control. Yes, I know I'm a freak. :P
Restore America: Dr. Ron Paul for President!
I have many windows open all the time. Usually 10 or so notepads open all over, everytime I want to type a quick note I open notepad type it and never close it. Same with calculator, I usually have several of those open. Same with browser windows (tabs now) and IM windows.e .jpg
Quicken, PuTTY, Firefox, Thunderbird to name a few others running.
About once every few weeks I'll go through and close some unused windows.
Uptime is usually 2+ months.
Screenshot from about two years ago.
http://www.niconet2k.com/~nicodemus/images/vstabl
Imagine what it was before tabbed browsing --
I typically have between 200-400 tabs open in Firefox before my box starts dying. Tabs may be held up as the answer to window management, but for me, tabs aren't enough as they take too many system resources (I tend to run out of system objects)
Why so many tabs? I'm a complete and utter news addict -- I'm the guy who reads a newspaper cover to cover and who is subscribed to several of them to watch for the competing editorial lines, national points of view, opinion pieces, and political bents.
I'm a bit harebrained, so I open them off the websites before they disappear, which is why I always open all of them.
What I'd really like see is a kind of queue system, where a "middle-click" doesn't open a new tab, but adds it to a special "Queue" folder in the bookmarks. Then, a hotkey could remove the topmost item in the queue and open it. Any suggestions from fellow tab addicts?
Because I rarely use many programs at once, I am usually limited to one or two windows at once. If stray windows get left open, I close them (if I want them later, I will save/bookmark everything). I like to have a tidy desktop.
Four virtual desktops, set up in a square, with shortcuts to go up, down, left, and right, and no wrapping around. That just ends up being confusing. By setting it up this way, I can "go up, go right" to get to the top-right from any window. (Fitt's law, each virtual workspace is infinitely large this way.)
Upper left: Web, console, maybe music player. Actually, this and all further "consoles" are actually Konsole, which is the best console app I've had by far. (I was xterm for a long time, but the way KDE makes it easy for apps to have configurable keyboard shortcuts for so many things is awesome. Tab navigation is set up with the same keys as for Mozilla, and I've got one-keystroke SSH access to my work systems, along with custom icons to indicate that.)
Upper right: Communications. Email client, console, chat main window. (Chat windows sometimes wander.) Torrent client when torrenting.
Lower left: Two emacs windows at maximum height, side by side, for work. (When people say "large windows mean my code doesn't need to conform to the old 80-col limit", I show them this setup and about half the time they are Enlightened. More code = better for the forseeable future.) Console.
Lower right: Misc. Console. Any hobby projects often get sent there, as do certain documents I'm writing.
I use a laptop, but I usually suspend instead of rebooting so these configurations will often last a while.
ALT-SHIFT-arrow to change desktops. CTRL-ALT-SHIFT arrow to change desktops and move the highlighted window. Focus follows mouse, and that's about all the mouse gets used for (that and link clicking; I've tried the various "link enumerator" plugins for Firefox but they're too slow right now).
What's interesting is that I don't/didn't set up these distinctions on purpose, they've evolved and only later did I figure out what I was doing. Web browser got the upper left (start) window because that's the first thing I opened, usually.
Also, as anal as this sounds, I've been happy with several environments in the past that offered these features, plus keyboard shortcuts to start programs. (ALT-F1 for Mozilla, ALT-F2 for console, ALT-F3 to switch between Dvorak and QWERTY (for my wife when she wants to use the computer); I've had several things on ALT-F4 but none ever stuck, plus I feel I probably shouldn't get too used to hitting that key combo for when I do go back to windows.)
If each tab got its own window, I'd have tons of windows. Thank goodness for tabs.
I use fvwm's pager under Linux. I found some years ago that I was unhappy when I have less than 3x3 screens, i.e. 9 virtual screens. I open one large and teo small xterms per default. I usually have an opera with 3-10 tabs in the next one. The rest is then filled with between none and 4 xterms. All in all you could say (counting the tabs) that I have between 6 and 41 windows open at any given time. In special circumstances I may reach 60-70 open windows.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Three: Firefox, Messenger, & Media App (with many others running in the quickbar)
I work with a weird window manager (WMI and not WMII) that I love but nobody else uses.
Desktop 1: 6 terms
Desktop 2: Firefox (constant tab for gmail, generally 3-5 peaking at around 20 during the daily read) + Mail
Desktop 3: Gimp or Inkscape
Desktop 4: Gaim, irc, misc
For a total of around 10, but I can get to any window in two keystrokes and I'm mouse free except for artwork and the occasional website.
I'm on one of the better PIII machines, 666MHz. My idle process runs as high as 87% but averages about 84% with outlook and two ie windows. They did get in a shipment of P4's but someone took half the memory out of them.
Someone hates these cans.
I hate tabs, so I keep everything in its own window. Still, I almost never have more than 7 or 8 open, and usually closer to two or three.
I also close all the firefox windows when I'm done looking at them, I figure that's what bookmarks are for, so it's never running for more than a few hours.
I am 30 and have been playing on pc's since the 8086 during 1986.
:-)
I usually get uncomfortable when I have more than 3 apps opened until recently when memory became more plentiful. Today I have around 4 or 5 and 2 or 3 tabs on firefox.
THe reason behind this is I remember teh days of running Windows 3.11 on 4 megs of ram and Windows95 on 8 megs of ram. TO get the best performance for games you needed to create your own autoexec.bat and config.sys files for DOS. I used Windows only for boring things like AOL 1.0 and Mosiac web browser. I bet the younger crowd who get into serious hacking with 32 and 64 meg systems have more windows opened.
I still think keeping things minimium is the best thing even though I now have over 1 gig of ram on my laptop that I am writing this post in.
http://saveie6.com/
Seriously, why ever close anything? Until your OS can't handle the number of open windows, anyway..... (or you launch a video game or 3d modeller that needs the resources)
Shouldn't this be a poll? :P
I run dual 21" monitors, I have 10-12 applications open at any time, I leave them open most of the time, even if i'm not using them at the moment. One or two of those apps is always mozilla, and I'll have a random number of tabs open (usually a dozen, sometimes more than can be counted if I'm researching something, sometimes only a few if I'm finishing up). I have 6 quicklaunch icons, and another 6 hotkeys on my trackball to launch more stuff.
hth hand
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
For me, this swings back and forth. Partly this is due to my preference for the command line: many of the things I do happen in the same window.
Right now I've only got my "all the time" windows hanging around. Firefox is usually there, as is Emacs running Slime, an xclock, and a terminal dedicated to my sound card mixer. I also have a drop-down console a la Quake.
Of course, when I'm working on something the number can spiral up: a word processor, a couple more Firefox windows to keep my work stuff separate from the tabs waiting to be read, ssh sessions to my other computer, and a few more terminals are all frequent visitors.
I generally don't keep windows hanging around when I'm not using them, since it's usually faster to reopen a program than to find its icon on the desktop.
Well, I have 20 windows open right now. This window has two tabs: one for reading the discussion and one for writing this response. The reason the number is this low is that I just restarted my browser and e-mail client. I also shut down all of my X11 apps last night. So sometime last night I had well over 50 windows open plus many tabs in most browser windows.
This is on my 3-year-old PowerBook with 512MB of ram.
The 1.5-year-old ThinkPad I use at work has twice as much ram and usually has a hard time when I go over about 40 windows plus assorted tabs. Windows keeps losing task bar entries and I have to use Alt-Tab to bring them back.
I frequently work on something for a while then switch to doing something else. I also keep lots of text editor windows open for jotting down notes.
My browser windows frequently have over a dozen tabs open. Each window will have a particular topic. Let's say I'm trying to track down the meaning of an obscure error message. The first tab will be Google. The next 20 or so will be the results of middle-clicking on any promising results from the various searches I've done in the first tab. Once I think I have enough links open, I'll go through the tabs one-by-one closing the ones that don't have useful data. The tabs have been loading in the background, so I don't have to wait for pages to load. I do the same thing whenever I'm confronted with a list of links: on e-bay and amazon, searching realestate listings, and reading forums. It just seems natural to do it that way.
When programming, I have several editor windows and terminals open. If I'm writing a web-app, then I have browser windows open and more terminals for scanning logs.
I can't understand how people use a browser with only a few windows and/or tabs open. Do those people like watching pages load? Do they never have to look up more than one thing at a time?
To be honest with you it's quite cold up here in Minnesota right now so I currently have zero windows open. During the summer, however, it's anywhere from 0-12.
YMMV based on house size/config/location (du -hs ~; cat ~/.config; echo ~)
I find that on Windows I can handle the fewest windows open, OS X a middling amount (if you count hidden windows), and the most on Linux (Enlightenment WM).
My current count (I'm at work) is 7 windows and 20 browser tabs open on the MS Windows machine, and on the Linux machine, 30 windows (across 8 desktops) and 94 browser tabs open.
On the Linux box, most of the windows and tabs haven't been touched for days, some of them for weeks or months. On the Windows box, everything has been used in at least the five days or so.
~ roscivs
At work on the new Intel iMac, I typically have Thunderbird, Firefox, Photoshop, Illustrator, Filemaker Pro, iChat and Address Book open. I have the computer set to automatically startup at 8:30am and shutdown at 6:00pm. Since I use those programs every day (and often) I have them all set to open at startup. Occasionally I'll open Excel, Word, Powerpoint, iPhoto or Fugu - once it's opened for the day it stays open (with the notable exceptions of iPhoto and Fugu - for some reason things get slow and buggy when those two are open at the same time) I do the leave things open all day because I hate to wait on things to load, and I especially hate splash screens when a program opens. I will close windows when needed, but the program keeps running. As you can tell, I do not work in the Tech field.
At home I have a crappy old HP laptop. I typically only use it for web use so I just keep Firefox running all the time, hibernating the computer when not in use. Only other thing ever really used it the Flickr Uplodr and Photoshop. It gimps out on me if I open too much at once.
You are one of those people who keep complaining about Firefox memory leak problem, aren't you? What the hell are doing opening 25 windows? I can hardly go over 6/7 windows even when I am doing the most intensive development work.
Others with faster machines that don't have to care so much about performance will have more - this is on a 600MHz PIII with a single monitor.
I try to have as few open at all times. This is because it makes finding the RIGHT window difficult, and trying to ALT+TAB through them all takes an eternity. When I am at work, I have:
Firefox, Outlook, Zend Studio (or other editor), 2 terminals
Anything else that I use is opened on an as-needed basis. When I see some of the other developers at work with a half dozen browser windows (not tabs - windows), four terminals, an editor, email client, a few instances of notepad, a database GUI, maybe an HTML editor, etc... Then, when they want to have me look at something, they spend so much time switching around windows trying to find what they want... How can they work like that?
It makes my head HURT. Sometimes, a feeling akin to claustrophobia. What would that be called? horribly-cluttered-and-crowded-taskbar-aphobia? Whatever it is, I have it.
As is often the case, less is more.
Love sees no species.
I'd say that is low. Usually about 6 or 7. Almost never more than 12.
And spread across three or four pager screens.
Neatness is next to Godliness you know.
Only one respose out of 134 shows up on default AC settings.
I think to some extent, it may depend on when you started using computers. Back in the day, multitasking OSes didn't exist. Even when it became possible to have multiple windows open at any given time, the hardware wasn't fast enough to have multiple windows open at the same time. Some of us are a little slow to adapt to faster hardware....
Personally, I try to minimize the number of apps I have open at any given time. If I'm not actually using the program, it's closed. I've got the same range of apps installed that you do, most likely, but I don't use GIMP often enough to have it open full time. Or any of the other slow-loading programs that I have on my system. Firefox opens relatively quickly, so does Thunderbird. And when I'm playing games like GuildWars, I run full screen so I try to free up as many resources as possible to squeeze those 3 extra frames per second out of it.
So... in response to your question, the only program I leave open full time is GAIM. Everything else, I close when I'm not using it.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
1: email, 2: terminal (tabbed), 3: browser (tabbed), 4: misc crap.
One per virtual desktop. I've mapped a single keystroke to switch desktops left or right... it's faster than alt-tabbing because you have a spatial map in your head of where the windows are, and it's certainly much faster than fiddling with the mouse. Plus using the whole screen for each window means less scrolling, which is faster again. I never really got into the whole mouse thing, though it's useful for some stuff I suppose.
Software patents delenda est.
For me, most of the time, it's two: One window is gnome-terminal, and the other is Firefox. This has been my pattern for the last year or two... I used to use screen, so I kept everything in one terminal; but nowadays I just open a new one when needed. (Pros: gnome-terminal's scrollback works. Cons: Can't detach and reattach on another terminal.)
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Why restart your Mac every five days? It's not Windows 95 you know.
My Mac currently has 28 open windows, from 14 different applications. 7 tabs in Firefox. Uptime is 23 days. This is typical. It sleeps when I'm not using it; I once worked out the trade-off point was about 8-12 hours of sleep = one bootup, in terms of energy consumption. It gets restarted every couple of months when there's an OS update that requires it. I don't close an application unless I only use it rarely and it's a bit of a memory hog (like Photoshop).
I find working this way is highly efficient. I can go from sleeping machine to working in any of my regular applications in under five seconds. When it's awake, any regular application is a quick Cmd-Tab (if my hands are on the keyboard) or click (Dock or Exposaaaay) away.
I worked pretty much the same way when my main desktop machine was a Windows 2000 box, though suspend never worked properly, so I used Hibernate and had a slightly longer delay first-thing. I also sometimes used that box for games and would close applications to free resources and maximise fps.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Right now I'm on my iBook with a typical number of windows and tabs open.
I just counted 16 windows (spread over eleven apps) and 5 browser tabs open.
This laptop rarely gets shut down, it usually just sleeps between uses. Restarts are probably every two or three weeks.
Even when working in meatspace I used to work in layers on my physical desk. As a project manager/engineer I'd often have a large number of simultaneous projects running, and needed rapid access to all of them, depending on who the next call came from.
My laptop "desktop" is very reminiscent of my old (real) desktop.
--
Tomas
I have 10.
2x Explorer
1x Thunderbird (email)
1x SQL Server Management Studio
2x Microsoft Visual Studio
1x Opera (browsing, 14 tabs)
2x Internet Explorer (asp.net app testing)
1x GAIM (slacking off)
Currently 2 monitors, usually 3.
Main Ubuntu Desktop system has 5 virtual desktops on 1 monitor, here's windows per desktop:
5, 2, 1, 1, 2
One of which is a remote desktop session to a windows 2003 server which currently has 6 windows but so few because I'm not working right now.
A windows machine on the other monitor for work and games has 7 open windows right now.
My screen session on the linux desktop currently has 6 windows active, my firefox on linux has 6 tabs open, on windows firefox has 10 tabs, visual studio on the remote desktop session has 23 files open.
Soooo lets see that brings my total to somewhere around 5 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 6 + 7 + 6 + 6 + 10 + 23 = 69
This sig will make it clear that ANYONE can use this post for ANY purpose WITHOUT the written consent of the NFL.
I would rather keep things closed until they're necessary, thereby reducing the clutter of my workspace(s) and dedicating the maximum amount of resources to my active process(es). Less is more, IMHO.
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
At home I usually have on at least 8-9 windows open that stay open between restarts which is usually once every several months (Linux user here.. I rarely reboot my computer, let alone log off).
:-D )
Yes that does include about 5 different firefox windows with at least 3-4 tabs each that are "Static research" tabs that I have open for quite a while.
My work system has MORE windows open as it has a dual monitor setup. Plus if you count all the sticky notes open there, that's about a dozen more. I need to get a second monitor for my home system. Ahh the joys of being a programmer.
and My Mac OS X machine anywhere from 5-15 windows open all the time depending on if I have X-code up and running while I'm programming (usually stays open for weeks to months at a time.)
Now for the "windows" machine which sits most of the time suspended (vmware) has usally one window open. as it is usally only started to test some website in IE, then gets suspended again. (so technically that has a LONG time between reboots
1 Firefox Window with a website I'm working on (usually a few tabs for various parts I'm looking at). 1 Internet Explorer just to verify there aren't any CSS or JS issues. 1 Text Editor 1 Photoshop 1 FTP 1 Stock ticker during the day
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Oh! Look at that! I had iCal minimized and didn't realize it. So that's 10 right now. This is why I prefer windowshading to minimization, because I always forget that I minimized something. But I haven't installed WindowshadeX on my school 'puter yet.
Of course, I also have various things running that don't require an open window. Virtual Desktops is one, as well as a To Do program called Check Off that stays in my menubar. And the dashboard widgets, of course; how do you classify those?
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
I don't have any windows open. It's too cold outside right now. In the middle of the afternoon though there's about 2 or 3 to get the airflow going
Inexperienced users, or those who prefer to focus on one task at a time, generally want to keep one single window open. I know this, since most customers that I've helped troubleshoot tend to close browser windows for their Router configuration page as soon as I want to open a command prompt window.
Some users feel that running too many applications at once can slow down the system - in a way they are correct, but they also know that multitasking is more efficient than closing down the application window.
Naturally, you have a crowd that works on mutliple things at once, and are willing to open as many windows as necessary - they either activly use these windows, or have them waiting in the background when done with the current task. This is what I do normally, but right now, I only have ~2 windows open since I'm using a laptop. I have no problem opening up much more windows on a real computer.
And after reading this thread, you have users that open windows "just in case." Enough said.
If your rate is say 1 $/kWh, then
1 $/kWh = 0.1 /Wh = 0.1 /W/h
Whoopsie you do get charged per watt
The Jerk Store called and they were all out of you!
Work:
Laptop: Browser with four work related and 5 non-work related tabs, 3 putty sessions, e-mail (notes), work chat (with 2 or 3 chat windows in addition to the main chat window) and Trillian for personal/customer stuff.
Solaris: Four desktops, three terminal windows, one browser.
Home:
Laptop: Browser with 5 or 6 tabs, 2 or three terms
Desktop: Browser with 5 or 6 tabs including safari.oreilly.com, ebook I'm browsing, a term or two if I'm "studying", Trillian. Since it's my game machine, I'll have something up in between, lately Doom 3.
Today I had 6 putty sessions open and a dos session on work box. Two to my two sun boxes so I can build custom solaris patch clusters for work, and four for various checking on target boxes and the dos window for transferring patches (I work at home so I work on the two sun boxes and laptop then transfer files up to work as necessary).
If I get too many windows open (about 10 or so), I'll start check and closing them down.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
I ran seti@home classic 24/7 for seven years on as many as four machines at a time and never fewer than two. I babied these computers, checking for heat problems and power usage and had to periodically replace worn out hardware. I optimized the seti client for each individual machine to get the most work for energy used, shut off monitors when not in use and never ran the seti screen saver on the lone Windows machine. As near as I could tell, energy usage on my little lan was never a serious issue and I was willing to pay for it because I felt I was doing a small part to advance science.
All of that changed when the seti@home project switched over to the BOINC client to handle administrative tasks. The GNU/Linux machines began shutting themselves down because of high processor temperatures, lost two power supplies in a short period and fans were constantly running full bore. I tried many different optimizations of both the BOINC and seti clients but was never able to achieve the calm I had with seti classic. That was enough for me and I quit the project.
Windows open on my OSX desktop:
1. Firefox (tabs: 1. my current project, 2. phpmyadmin for current project, 3. slashdot)
2. Textwrangler
3. NeoOffice spreadsheet (timesheet, YES I am clocked out right now!)
4. Thunderbird
5. iTunes
6. Azureus (bittorrent)
That's it, although I have more open windows when I'm using Fire (OSX IM client).
"It was hell!" recalls former child.
If I'm in Windows at work: Query Analyzer, EMR, SQL Server 2000 Help, various folders, files needing some SQL lovin or I'm referencing, Outlook. At most. Some days, it's just VS 2005, Firefox, and Outlook. If I'm working on the website, Crimson Editor. Somedays it is Word, Excel, Visio, or something along those lines.
The computers stay on over there 24/7. And what does Remote Desktop count as?
At home:
If I'm on my main Windows box: Freecell. Sometimes eMule. Firefox. Various games. OpenOffice. Power outages take it down, but that's about it.
If I'm on my laptop (shut down when not in use):
In Windows: Sometimes the same as work. Sometimes the same as my main Windows box. Paint Shop Pro.
In Linux: Firefox, Kate, a shell. Sometimes I'll open GIMP to do some minor (very minor) graphic work.
My server: Headless box. Does not have a windowing environment. Command line only. Once again, outages take it down and that's about it.
I guess I never really go over 20 windows at any given time. And if I'm pushing 20 then there is some really weird reason.
My twitter
I generally have 2 screens (laptop; if I take it anywhere I have to leave the second screen behind), and could probably do well with 3. Each workspace has a maximized window on one screen, a couple smaller windows on the other screen, and sometimes another maximized window also on the other screen.
I currently have 16 windows, but this varies a fair bit depending on what I'm doing. Right now 4 of these are terminals, two of which have multiple tabs.
6 workspaces, of which I usually use 4-5. The first 2 are "general" areas, email/web/usenet/etc. The others are for whatever particular things I'm working on, and will generally have a terminal, an editor (nearly always with multiple documents, and I'm starting to use xemacs with 3 frames for this), and sometimes a browser (nearly always with multiple tabs). I also have an xchat set to always be visible.
Browser windows generally have 4-12 tabs open. If I ever bother to get the tabbar to go back to being vertical, this will go back to more like 6-18+.
I normally have only one program open per desktop. I find that the easiest way to use any program with the most efficiency. One desktop for firefox (2 tabs is enough), One desktop for a music player, one for gaim so I can talk to other humans. One desktop for a terminal so I can talk to my computer. Then one more for a file manager so I can talk to my files. A quick button press or mouse wheel changes between them and everything gets a full screen.
Two monitors. Each monitor has its own set of 8 virtual desktops. Most of these desktops have maximized terminal windows, though some of them have groups of smaller terminal windows.
Each monitor also has an Emacs window taking up one desktop. One monitor has a Firefox window. I'd probably have two of those too, except Firefox kind of blows and can't do that reasonably.
The terminals are split up among several different sorts of tasks. A few of them are dedicated to specific things like email (mutt), IRC/IM, and the like. Many of them display various program-related outputs from various processes/execution threads. Other ones are general purpose shells.
Overall, there are probably about 25 windows at all times. In addition, Firefox will always have at least half a dozen tabs.
Under no circumstances will I touch that horrible rattain thing except to drive Firefox. Those things are evil. All workspace switching etc. is by keyboard. If the main UI environment tried to make me use the rattail thing for any ordinary task, I would delete it and install another. In general, if something asks me to "click here" a lot, I go to a terminal window, type "kill pid" and then delete it. Obviously certain types of apps (drawing programs etc.) are exempted.
At one point I was working at a place where we had to work with some horrific Windows based build process. I spent about a week trying to beat the Winblows box into submission, but there was really no way to make the horrible user interface work in a reasonable fashion. I ended up installing cygwin and ssh'ing into the thing from a Linux box to run builds. That worked a lot better.
Recently I've tried using Macs a bit, and found them to be fairly ok. The lack of decent virtual desktop support kind of restricts them to toy uses for now though, though I hear they might support a functional environment for doing work in the next release.
2. IRC and a terminal. 3 max (either xmms or firefox).
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
You mean something like a Virtual Desktop Manager? It may not be the same as Fedora's version but I think that is what you want...
The worst is when you have 10 or 12 emacs windows open when you come back from lunch, forget why you had all the different windows in the places you had them, say screw it, and start all over.
The question should be ... why are you having to restart your Mac every 5 days?
I'd like to see how OS and use of virtual desktops affect people's windowing habits. I suspect that Linux's good use of swap and the virtual desktops that nearly every WM provides contribute to opening a lot of windows.
on my work machine (windows xp) I typically have about a dozen windows open and around 12 tabs in firefox, typically i'll have: 2 or 3 instances of visual studio an instance or two of VNC Total commander (which probably has about 12 tabs open) Firefox ( ~12 tabs 2 of which are using IE's engine (for testing purposes)) SQL Query Analyzer Enterprise Manager Winamp UltraEdit(several tabs, depending on how many config files i'm fidgetting with) if I use anything else i'll typically close it straight away after use coz otherwise the desktop becomes too damn cluttered... which is why I use geoShell, very helpful tool... at home, on my ubuntu/gentoo boxes I don't close any windows, just have a few on each desktop (god multiple desktops are great, why are there no desktop managers for windows that compare??? geoshells, nvidias and even microsofts desktop switching tools are all pathetic...) on my home Windows PCs i'll typically only have a couple of windows open at a time...
-- Sex is the antonym of pringles. Once you pop it's time to stop.
but right now, I only have ~2 windows open since I'm using a laptop. I have no problem opening up much more windows on a real computer.
What difference should a laptop have that would cause you to open less windows than a "real" computer? You should treat a laptop just the same except that it's portable; I would say that not having a working suspend function is limiting your ability to get things accomplished.
I will agree with you about users that close windows before opening new ones. Sadly this is commonplace for both novice users and veteran users. Novices sometimes don't understand the idea of background tasks and veteran users may have trained themselves to close apps to save resources. I've seen quite a few people use desktop shortcuts for all of their applications and don't quite get the minimize function.
It also doesn't help that the dominant OS, Windows XP, still will occasionally hide dialog boxes underneath other windows and these will not show in the taskbar. I've even had dialog boxes hidden underneath the (MS Office) application that spawned it and it wouldn't let me do anything including minimizing the window until I closed the dialog box. This can be a major annoyance for people who know what's going on; I can't imagine what sort of usability nightmare this would be for the beginning multitasker.
An easy rule of thumb that I've noticed is that most non-multitaskers will auto-hide their taskbar. After all, the taskbar really isn't as useful if you are only performing one task.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I am temping at a help desk for a big financial company where I was tasked to install a new plug in for MS Outlook 2003. This required the closing of the Outlook application. On this Windows XP machine with group tasking turned on, the Outlook tab had the number 75 (seventy five). This guy had a 75 various Outlook windows open... And this version of Outlook groups all the reminders on to one Window. He had 75 different open messages. It took nearly 5 minutes for the OS to close all the windows. This user also had about 50 (fifty) MS Word documents and about 20 MS Excel documents. Surprisingly only 4 Internet Explorer windows.
Sometimes, I'm not doing as much work on the notebook as I do on my desktop computer. Sometimes, I find that opening a large number of windows causes the taskbar to become filled up (making task switching more difficult). While I know that I can still open as many windows as I want, it looks like there's too many windows open if the task bar becomes nearly full (especially when I have two lines for that taskbar.)
It's more of an emotional reason rather than a logical reason.
Right now I am doing nothing particularly special. I have 6 virtual desktops. 1 is kvirc and a terminal. 2 is firefox (11 tabs), azureus, kate, thunderbird, gftp, and a terminal app with 2 tabs. 3 is kate and 4 terminals, each with 2 tabs, this is my code development environment, currently with all sorts of gimp stuff open. 4 is openoffice with 4 windows (writer, writer, calc, impress). 5 is empty, its where games go. 6 is actually running gimp under development on 3.
Desktop 2 is cluttered because I recently downgraded from 9 desktops and it was where most of the missing stuff ended up. I will likely move azureus and thunderbird over with kvirc on desktop 1, and single-window my kate with whats on desktop 3 some time soon.
That is a total of 18 windows (counting gimp as one), with about 30 "tabs" (browser tabs, files open in kate, tabbed terminals). This is my average load. At any given time I may have a few terminals closed, or more or less tabs, or extra software running for whatever.
PS: Of course I also have a half dozen things running in the KDE kicker panel, system monitor, calendar, etc.
I use Windows xp with the classic theme. I have at most one window open persistently, and when I'm working I try to keep it to five windows or less. I can do about ten tabs in SeaMonkey before it gets too cluttered for me. I also have about 14 Notification icons.
How many windows?
As others have said, it all depends on OS and whether this is one of my work computers (I have several) or one of my home systems.
Considering home first. On the Windows XP machine that I'm using now there are 8 windows open (Quickbooks, 4 open office and 3 Firefox at the moment - each Firefox instance has multiple tabs). That's pretty typical for this machine. These windows typically don't stay open longer than a couple of days. This computer also typically doesn't stay up 24/7.
Over on the other side of the room is a Fedora system which serves as both a desktop and server for various things. That system is never shut down and some windows, especially mail and terminal clients are up for many days, typically weeks at a time. Typically there are probably 20 or so gnome terminals, instances of Firefox, gimp sessions, and always at least one mail client opened - scattered across 4 gnome desktops.
At work, my main computer is a Sun workstation (again a Gnome based environment). There I'll have one desktop dedicated to software development (Sun Studio tools with all its own windows and tabs), an instance or two of a software build that I'm testing, a Firefox app for some research I'm doing, and a gnome terminal window (with tabs) for various other things. Another gnome desktop will be used mostly for communication/email and there I'll have 3 or 4 gnome terminals, mail client and web browser. The web browser (Firefox) typically has multiple tabs as do the gnome terminals that on this desktop I use to connect to other systems I administer. As for the other two gnome desktops (I stick to the default 4 desktops) I use them if I have something not tied to development or communication/administration. I try to use the desktops to better multi-task. I actually find it hard working in a standard windows xp environment because of the lack of built-in multiple desktops. Yes, I know there are some tricks you can use to pretend that you have a true multi-desktop system in MS Windows XP, but it really isn't the same thing. I never shut down this work machine unless I'm testing something or upgrading something that requires a shut-down/reboot so the windows can be open for a very long time - weeks to a couple of months.
One of my coworkers never, ever shuts down his development machine (also a Sun blade) and he probably has 50+ windows open for many months at a time. He gets really upset when his gnome terminal windows crash after 3+ months of being open.
I also have a windows based workstation that typically only has one application running all day (a corporate email client) with maybe up to 5 other windows/applications opened at the same time.
In summary I guess you could say it depends on whether it is a MS Windows based machine or a Unix/Linux machine. Modern Unix/Linux really lends itself to having lots of windows open and lets the user manage them efficiently. So if you're really using these machines (for work or play) you'll have lots of windows open - and often leave them open for extended periods especially if it is for work. On the other hand, MS Windows really doesn't handle massive numbers of windows well (without resorting to a downloaded hack/patch) so I rarely have more than 7 or 8 windows open in that environment, often much less.
I don't like to have more than maybe 10 Windows open max and a total of roughly 10 tabs. Any more than that gets cluttered and I start closing things. I like being able to read stuff. The only time I have to overrule this is at work when I need to have several things open because I access them constantly (I work on a help desk). I hate the set up at work I have, but its necessary. Oh and I never turn my PC off (its a web server for one thing) and as long as your monitor is not on, it doesn't really consume that much power. People that freak out over that are retarded, I've never understood that "OMFG YOU LEAVE UR COMPUTERZ ON ALL DAY?!?!?" when it probably costs you an extra 5 bucks a month. Wopp-dee-fucking doo. -_-
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
My main working machine (NetBSD):
1. One giant xterm, running screen. Borderless 1600x1200 window, in 36-point lucida typewriter, for an 80x31 display.
2. Firefox with anywhere from 4-10 tabs.
3. GAIM.
4. xchat.
5. Sometimes one of staroffice or acroread, or something similar.
Each of these is a full-screen workspace; I loves me some Ion3.
On the Mac: One terminal, one Safari, one Moneydance, and then whatever else I'm working in only while I'm actually using it.
On Windows: One firefox, one or two filesystem windows, an app, and a full-screen video game hiding them all.
So I guess I tend towards smallish numbers of windows. The only machine I use two-headed is the Mac, and the second monitor is used mostly to pop open a terminal that ssh's over to the mailserver to browse things I need access to (CD keys, etc) while using full-screen apps under Windows, or to watch movies while I write.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I'm pretty used to following setup:
On first virtual desktop:
two terminals, each with two tabs:
- email client and usenet client
- irc session and jabber client
On second virtual desktop:
WWW browser
Third:
content based on work context, so word processor, or terminals with compilers, or some simulation programs etc.
Fourth virtual desktop:
- RSS reader
- additional terminals needed by work from third desktop
Five desktop:
- music player
Also, on every desktop I have 3-line high terminal showing logs.
So how do you count windows? Only currently visible or summarizing from all virtual desktops? Are tabs windows?
:wq
This is the situation on my workstation, right now:
Desktop #1 (mail): 2 shells, running mutt against different mail servers
Desktop #2 (admin): 3 shells for sysadmin work
Desktop #3 (work): 4 windows left over from editing and compiling
Desktop #4 (work2): 5 windows (4 shells: edit, edit, logtail, tmp), 1 firefox (with 4 tabs). Web work.
Desktop #5 (foo): 2
Desktop #6 (web): 3 windows (2 shells, Konqueror with 6 tabs (often more))
Desktop #7 (cal): Calendar
Desktop #8 (x): 4 shells from some old sysadmin work
Desktop #9 (more): 2 shells, 1 firefox with 2 tabs, web work
Desktop #10 (game): 1 shell, quarry, GnuGo
That makes 25 windows. And I cleaned some unused things only yesterday. Could have been nearly the double before that. This with an old 1.6 GHz Athlon with 1250 MB of RAM. No porn, this is a work machine, so I close those windows when not in use.
10 (not counting tabs in Firefox)
Nobody should need more than 640 kilo windows
You just got troll'd!
In Windows, I have 3-10 tabs open in Firefox at any given point, occasionally I have IE up for testing, I also tend to have Trillian, Outlook Express, and a few work (or fun at home) apps open. say 5-10. I turn off apps I'm not using because the Task Bar is not easy to navigate if you are visually impared. On BSD, I have simililar application counts at any given time, but I have it split between a large number of desktops, and give each desktop a "theme" or a whole window, to make interaction easy, given my vision.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
One thing I've often wished for is a heirarchical window manager. This would be a more general version of MDI where you can make a window that contains any other windows you wish. I often have far too many windows open because each thing I'm working on generally requires a web browser, a terminal, a text editor and perhaps a graphics editor. I'd much rather group these things by task than by application. Why can't I make an MDI window containing a web browser, a terminal and a text editor all at once? And of course, each of those inner windows should itself be able to have child windows, so my millions of source files can all live together in one sub-window.
With a UI like that, task switching would actually be switching tasks... as someone who often gets interrupted by other things while I'm working on a project, I'd love to be able to just spawn a second top-level window (leaving my previous one untouched), do what needs to be done and close it. The task list in my desktop environment would actually be a list of tasks I'm working on, not a list of applications I'm running. Surely someone must have made such a thing? Unfortunately I basically have to use Windows at work, but even under Linux I can't find anything of the sort.
I currently have 10 windows open (in Windows sadly) which include the following:
So does that count as 10? or would 40 be a more realistic number?
The number of windows open can be a misleading metric as a window can be a single function or it could be a highly complex IDE or even another OS!
2 Monitors, both at 1280x1024
Linux:
Each Monitor is a separate X display, and each of those runs fvwm2 with a 3x2 set of virtual desktops.
Monitor 1, Desktop1: 3 principal xterms for IRC/local email/other stuff, these are actually open all the time rather than ever minimised, oh and they're all attached to the same local screen sessions. And then there's the mostly-minimised ones: a spare user xterm and a root xterm on each of my local machines.
Desktop2: Couple of xterms ssh'ing to the server that holds my 'real' email, where I read news, that I help admin etc. Both are attached to the same screen session (-x) on there.
Desktop 3, 5 and 6: Empty, but will be taken up by things like GNUCash, GIMP or whatever extra programs I run.
Desktop 4: One wiiiiiiiiiiide xterm for ease of reading compilation output. Another normal (80x24) xterm for general shell user, and I'll fire up any number of other xterms here as needed when coding.
Monitor 2, Desktop 1, 3, 5, 6: Empty for spare use as above.
Desktop 2: Actually this is where the most used xterms+ssh to my email host run, the Monitor 1 versions are only used if I really need to see that stuff on Monitor 1 whilst looking at other things on Monitor 2.
Desktop 5: 1 Firefox window with as many tabs as I need, maybe the occasional extra window, plus the occasional temporary xterm.
Note that I'd actually like to just use the one fvwm2 instance and the one 3x2 pager of virtual desktops, but be able to arbitrarily show any desktop (including the same one) on either monitor. Yes, I've tried Xinerama, but that just makes each desktop span the two monitors and what both of them displays would change on paging around. If anyone knows a window manager that will achieve what I WANT (likely via enabling Xinerama and then the WM re-splitting the display into an area per Display) I'd LOVE to hear about it.
Anyway, to total up: 12 xterms, 1 Firefox window (with however many tabs I need), the FvwmPager on each Display and an xclock which shows on every desktop on the first Display. There's a lack of any permanent music player because I use a web-controlled jukebox for that.
And I tend to keep as few windows open as possible. Not because it is harder to manage. No, because I have some apps which are "POWER" apps. I have to shut everything down, and re-boot before running one particular app in one particular set of data, because even with 2GB of memory, Windows doesn't do enough memory garbage collection to allow that to run. I have to start fresh.
Now, having said that, the app in question will open 4 windows all by itself. And most times when I run it, I have at least e-mail open as well. But mostly 4-5 windows is all I run.
As for leaving things up for days? Why would I do that? I basically use 2 machines. The work machine is left on a few nights a week to process specific things, which run from 3 hours to 9 hours to run. Otherwise, it is shut down. The ultimate security. My laptop? I shut it down for transportation with me from home to work and back, and typically pack it away at night for the next morning, unless the back up is still running.
And don't get into this whole Seti at home for spare cycles crap. Those applications do not recognize long running jobs, and as such they want to kick in, even while my main app is running. This steals cycles from the main app, which doesn't have them to spare.
And if I want 2 screen to deal with, I have them. My desktop and my laptop, and believe me, I have cranked them both up and run them both at 100% side by side for hours, doing work, not maintenance. (And the two machines are a 2.8GHZ and a 3.6 GHZ as well).
21 (not counting tabs) 7 PuTTY 1 Outlook (Main) 3 Emails 1 Textpad 1 Eclipse 1 File Explorer 2 Word 1 Toad 3 IE6 3 FireFox tabs I don't see the point of counting browser tab. I have over 30 files opened in textpad, should those count too? What about the 9 windows in Toad over 4 database connections, which I navigate through tabs as well?
Any modern computer with ACPI can wake from suspend in under 5 seconds.
Are you really trying to tell me you can't wait *** 5 seconds *** ???
I'd hate to see you with a laptop.
I generally have 4 windows at the 4 corners: terminal, email, browser, and editor. I use the 2nd desktop for superuser action.
The "wait for boot" argument is null and void as of about 3-4 years ago when all computers started shipping with decent ACPI support.
You're computer can suspend to memory and wake from suspend in under 5 seconds each. While suspended it uses almost 0 wattage. So it's more like 10 seconds a day + 30 days a month is 5 minutes of time, not an hour.
While I know that I can still open as many windows as I want, it looks like there's too many windows open if the task bar becomes nearly full (especially when I have two lines for that taskbar.)
You need virtual desktops. Real, working ones.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
... we never open the windows.
I think I generally have around a dozen windows open at a time, and anywhere from 3 to 30 tabs open in my browser. In Windows I make the taskbar tall enough for the clock to show the date, which, depending on the version, is two or three rows tall. I generally fill a two row taskbar, and occasionally fill a three row taskbar. My PC at home usually stays on 24/7, but I close most windows before I leave the house. At work, I shut down the PC every night. The last thing I need is for someone to send out an email or browse a webpage or something from my computer when I'm away that'll get me in trouble. I could do a password-protected screensaver, but I don't.
I also have a Mac running OS X. I don't use it nearly as much as my Windows PC. It's not on as often, or for as long, so consequently I don't usually open more than about 1/2 dozen windows at a time on it.
-Rich
I use four virtual desktops.
Desktop 1 has a Lotus Notes e-mail client window, a Sametime "Instant Messaging Contact List" window, two UTS Express UTS20 emulation windows, and the UTS Express Toolbar. I'll call it four.
Desktop 2 has one X window (NEdit via Cygwin), this browser window, a notepad open with important stuff, the Cygwin xterm, and six PuTTY session windows. That's ten.
Desktop 3 just has my QA system monitoring stuff (a pair of PuTTY windows), and Desktop 4 has a pair of production system monitoring windows (two PuTTY windows).
Grand total is 18 right now. Not a lot.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Using VNC, I have 20 tabs or so in one FF2.0 [which is harder to tell how many tabs there are now that they scroll instead of scrunch into the window], and about 14 windows + 11 windows and 7 tabs on the other computer.
Oh You POS
I'm a Xerox Alto programmer. I've got windows older than you.
Windows exacerbates the problem by having the mixed window/application metaphor. The fact that some applications have containing windows full of sub-windows while some spawn free-floating windows. Not to mention that the task bar becomes undreadable once there are too many entries. Virtual desktops are a great tool for any heavy multitasker, but I find on Mac OS X it's easier to manage large number of windows. Typically I range from 5 slowly growing to 100 windows before I close things down to reclaim memory. In Windows this would make the task bar steadily unusable, but on OS X the dock remains relatively unchanged. To deal with clutter I mostly just use "Hide Others". Expose's desktop view is the other piece that lets me work effectively with tons of windows.
On Linux and Solaris virtual desktops seeemed more natural, but I never got into them on OS X. I am looking forward to Spaces to see how good a job Apple can do with the concept.
"How many windows?" seems like the wrong question - the questioner already included the observation that their Firefox instance runs with multiple tabs. The same goes for any application which can open multiple things at once. Call these things information streams.
So, on my work machine right now I have nine virtual desktops. I'm actively using five of those today, but three only contain one window. Outlook only really lets you look at one thing at once, but the other applications (Firefox and Eclipse) keep many streams open at once using tabs.
Usual information stream coefficient for me is therefore:
@work - 8 single stream application windows + 5 tabs in Firefox + 10 files open in Eclipse = 25 (more if I have multiple Eclipses open, less if I am doing design spec work)
@home - 6 Finder windows + 3 Terminal windows + 5 tabs in Firefox + 6 other single stream apps = 20
I'm quite surprised those are so close.
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
9 items in my taskbar:
.. then usually a Windows Explorer window or two and other misc items.
1: Firefox - 1 tab
2: Firefox - 2 tabs
3: Firefox - 19 tabs
4: Outlook
5: Microsoft Terminal Services Client
6: Microsoft Terminal Services Client
7: Group Policy Management Console
8: iTunes
9: Outlook Reminder window
I restarted late yesterday so I'm sitting pretty low on open items right now. I usually have 5-ish Firefox windows open with several tabs in each and a heavier amount of tabs(10-15) in one or two.
My SVCHost has been a real pain latelly and sucking up RAM like a mofo. Its currently using 130MB which is on the lower end of what I've seen it at latelly. Thats the reason for my recent reboot. I do that when my computer starts paging too much.
Let's do an interesting collective experiment:
Send me screen shot of your taskbar as it looks now. Send it to slashdotwindows@gmail.com in any popular graphic format (jpg, gif, bmp, png).
I will post them all in my blog (http://tech-dissect.blogspot.com/).
Beware! The taskbar can reveal a lot of private information. Double check your submission and be sure to blur personal parts. But do not add or remove items. And don't open or close apps, send the taskbar as it looks now so we catch it in a natural position.
Feel free to add comments, I will post them too. I will not link the taskbars to sender's info.
I've always got 4 ssh terminals, 1 log window for local daemons, 2 windows for my source editor (console output in case of crash, and the actual editor), at least two file system browsers, 2+ consoles for testing software or downloading using wget, a browser window or two (with perhaps 4-6 persistent tabs on one), a couple help file windows (Python and wxPython generally), a chat window (with multiple tabs for my wife, work, etc.), maybe a copy of notepad or two.
I'm looking into tabbed versions of consoles and ssh windows, so we'll see if I can't make my life easier.
(slower than CLI, but much easier for demonstrations)
/* MAGIC THEATRE
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY
MADMEN ONLY */
I find that even "modern" systems over about 1 year old tend to start having issues with Suspend/Sleep functionality. Either they will fail to come back up after waking it or it will take 5+ MINUTES to figure out what the heck it's doing. In that case, it's faster to just restart. It seems to be one of those features that consistently wigs out the fastest on every machine I've ever owned.
Is this counting KVMs?
At home, I run WindowMaker with 7 virtual desktops on the main machine, and have, erm....
4 + 1 + 2 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 3 xterminals running
3 browser windows (1 netscape, 2 mozilla with 3-12 tabs each)
1 xchat with 8-12 tabs
1 xconsole + 1 xload
So that's 20 "windows" running, I suppose. Plus this machine is on a KVM, along with an OS X box that's running 2-5 Terminal.apps, Safari, Sherlock, iTunes, and whatever else I'm working on (currently, I have a spreadsheet up).
When I'm actively writing code, I use gvim, and typically have 3 or 4 gvim windows up.
So a total of, oh, 25 to 45 windows, depending.