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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?"

3 of 327 comments (clear)

  1. The number of the counting shall be three by Ed+Avis · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

    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 .xsession. If you need a window manager you can start one later from inside Emacs, and kill it when you no longer need it.

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    -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
  2. Well... by crossmr · · Score: 4, Funny

    *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.

  3. Re:Windows by lahvak · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The VDM power toy is nowhere near in functionality to any decent unix window manager with virtual desktops, and litestep is a total pain. Probably the best virtual desktop manager on windows is VirtuaWin (http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/), but still it lacks lot of useful features of my ancient fvwm setup.

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    AccountKiller