Ask Slashdot: How Do You Organize Your Virtual Desktops?

hyphenistic writes: As a programmer I find myself switching between multiple projects on a daily basis. Virtual desktops have been a big help in grouping my related programs together. I try to have a virtual desktop open for each project I'm working on. Although I've used Linux in the past my currently preferred desktop OS is Windows 10. For the most part I have found the new virtual desktops to be easy to use. My primary issue (regardless of OS) is that I really don't want my virtual desktops to interact with each other. In the past I have accomplished this with a separate login for each project but that brings the hassle of managing multiple sets of OS and application preferences. Can someone suggest a better method for organizing my virtual desktops?

Comments

Easy, just stop procrastinating

[netsavior]

You are falling victim to a classic problem. You don't want to do the actual work, so instead you focus on instrumentation and environment. The fact that you are asking these questions is proof that the "virtual desktop" mania you have embarked on is more of a hindrance than a help.

I mean, procrastination is half the fun, but don't fool yourself.

Re:Easy, just stop procrastinating

[TeknoHog]

I don't get the problem either. I like to use virtual screens a lot so I can focus on one thing at a time, and I often have just one or two windows per screen. A project might be spread over several desktops, for example due to having a single Emacs session for everything. I think a single monitor with multiple virtual screens actually helps me focus better than trying to see everyhting at once. This is one reason why the whole desktop metaphor is stupid.

Re: Easy, just stop procrastinating

[jambox]

Yeah I use them but only as an additional level of alt+tab. Ctrl+shift+left => workspace 1, Ctrl+shift+right => workspace 2 and COMMS (browser, email, chat)

Re:Easy, just stop procrastinating

[gstoddart]

Came here wondering who in the world uses virtual desktops?

Seriously? Because I've used virtual desktops since I fist discovered them in Linux in 1993, and as soon as I found the Windows Powertools or VirtuaWin I've always had them in Windows as well. In 1993 when the machine I had could a bunch of things in Linux when the exact same hardware would thrash in Windows, virtual desktops were awesome. I could have my desktop for coding, the one for FTP sessions, the one for the web browser. I remember using SLIP and having four terminal windows open for my school stuff.

Once you get used to them, the idea of having everything on one desktop feels moronic and cluttered. I don't want to go hunting for my window, and I tend to stay in one window (or set of windows) for a while at a time.

I don't close programs. I open them, and keep them open for days (if not weeks) at a time, and I keep them in separate desktops. I don't want to waste my time opening it, and I don't want it cluttering my view when I don't need it.

Hell, I've got a dual 24" monitor setup (one of which is shared with my laptop with a KVM) and I still run 6 virtual desktops to keep it from being cluttered and annoying to work with. And I find when I'm stuck with a single desktop, it's a nuisance to find stuff -- in part because I'll have 15-20 Windows open.

I can't imagine not using virtual desktops, because they've been part of how I work for over 20 years.

My "normal" load on my personal desktop is 3 different web browsers (for separate things and different levels of trust), 2-3 different VMs, iTunes, about 4 Windows Explorer windows, the software for my GPS, and occasionally my photo organizing software or my backups running.

tmux, cygwin

[StevenEdwards9792]

If you stick with Windows, install Cygwin and tmux. tmux helps me cleanly separate my areas of concern. (I currently have 15 sessions open, all project-specific.) Even better? Add Emacs and learn to use it well. Start an emacs server and connect to it in tmux with emacsclient -nw.

Fullness

[fluffernutter]

When one gets so full I can't do the thing I need to do quickly, I move to the next one. I breathe. Then I do what I need to do.

The others do it too, they just won't admit to it.

Re:Multiple desktops for OS X?

[dbosso]

Chech out totalspaces

KDE Activities

[Teun]

KDE has a solution called Activities.
You can set up a bunch of activities and assign individual windows to a particular activity.
When you swap activity you get the associated windows.

virtual workspaces and accounts

[unixisc]

I use different workspaces for different applications. On top of that, I have different login accounts on the same computer for different activities - one for personal activities (banking, credit cards and bills) as well as emails to family, another for my job search related activities, one for entertainment videos and news, one for /., one for playing games and one for just admin work (for some reason, FreeBSD has disabled the ability to have a separate root account for just that). Within any session, I use a different workspace for each application that I run - FireFox in one workspace, Chromium in another, games in a third, and so on.

Re:Multiple desktops for OS X?

[alexhs]

If you don't use full-screen-as-a-separate-space, it only requires a little tweaking of default parameters to get something usable, even if not to your liking. (By the way, is there some setting so that the default action is zoom and the alt/option one is full screen ?)

In settings -> mission control, deactivate automatically rearrange spaces, which is probably why you think that some applications appear on multiple spaces: actually, it's only on a single space (by default), but the spaces keep being rearranged.

If you want a space to span all monitors, I guess you can do it here too, but I'm a fan of distinct spaces on distinct screens, a feature I had 15 years ago on X11 (but which implied the inability to move windows between screens). Note that GNOME 3 does (did?) something "interesting" by default, which is a single desktop on the secondary screen, and virtual desktops on the primary one. Probably useful on laptops in presentation mode. (Is the default over-ridable) ?

In settings -> keyboard -> shortcuts, activate Mission control per-space bindings, so that you can swap between spaces with ctrl-(number). The catch is that you have to organize your spaces by task. You can then bind applications to some spaces. You can do that by alt-clicking in the dock and looking in options. Older versions of Mac OS X with Spaces (instead of Mission Control) had a list of assignations.

The space selection widget is gone though, if you won't use shortcuts, it's F3. Each space is rendered as a thumbnail on the top, you could choose a different background for each space if it helps you. The bottom part is all of the windows in the currently selected space. What is not very obvious is finding the currently selected space, depending on your color scheme: the white border is not very visible on white background.