Dear list,
I've been using scrotwm for a couple of weeks now and I am really impressed by its speed and ease of use. I always thought I needed a lot of things of a window manager but now I realise what I want is that the WM stays out of my way. It suddenly feels that the past 10 years of hardware improvement now suddenly power my actions rather than additional desktop candy.
In single-monitor mode, scrotwm does exactly what I want. A workspace is a 'task' (like browse, mail, work-project-1, work-project-2 etc), and it contains all windows needed for that task. Switching tasks is easy as it could be.
On multiple-monitors, however, I don't really get it. I got it set up easily with xrandr, and I think I understand how it works (1 workspace per screen, switching workspaces switches only the workspace on that screen, and switching to the workspace on the other screen swaps the screens.
However, I've now lost my easy task switching. For example, for mail I might want my mail program on the right, and a calendar and chat program on the left monitor. For project-1 I might have an editor on the left and two terminals on the right. Poject-2 has another editor and terminal combination.
Now, suppose I am working on project-1 [1:1 editor1 ; 2:2 term1&2] and want to switch to project-2 [1:3 editor2 ; 2:4 term3]. As far as I can tell, what I would need to do is something like Mod+3 (to load editor2 on the left window) Mod-shift-right (to move to the right window) Mod+4 (to load term3 on the right window) Mod-shift-right (to move back to the editor).
Of course, this is quite possible, but it requires more keypresses and especially one needs to be meticulous in doing things consistently, ie to prevent accidentally swapping stuff or ending up with the wrong editor and terminal combination.
What I think I would like is a way to 'glue' workspaces together, so that if I switch to workspace 1 I always get [1:1 ; 2:2], and if I switch to workspace 9 I get [1:9 ; 2:10]. Is this possible to configure? If not, would it be difficult to enable in the source?
Open question: am I strange that I think in this task-centered way? How do other people do task switching across multiple monitors?
I've been using scrotwm for a couple of weeks now and I am really impressed by its speed and ease of use. I always thought I needed a lot of things of a window manager but now I realise what I want is that the WM stays out of my way. It suddenly feels that the past 10 years of hardware improvement now suddenly power my actions rather than additional desktop candy.
In single-monitor mode, scrotwm does exactly what I want. A workspace is a 'task' (like browse, mail, work-project-1, work-project-2 etc), and it contains all windows needed for that task. Switching tasks is easy as it could be.
On multiple-monitors, however, I don't really get it. I got it set up easily with xrandr, and I think I understand how it works (1 workspace per screen, switching workspaces switches only the workspace on that screen, and switching to the workspace on the other screen swaps the screens.
However, I've now lost my easy task switching. For example, for mail I might want my mail program on the right, and a calendar and chat program on the left monitor. For project-1 I might have an editor on the left and two terminals on the right. Poject-2 has another editor and terminal combination.
Now, suppose I am working on project-1 [1:1 editor1 ; 2:2 term1&2] and want to switch to project-2 [1:3 editor2 ; 2:4 term3]. As far as I can tell, what I would need to do is something like Mod+3 (to load editor2 on the left window) Mod-shift-right (to move to the right window) Mod+4 (to load term3 on the right window) Mod-shift-right (to move back to the editor).
Of course, this is quite possible, but it requires more keypresses and especially one needs to be meticulous in doing things consistently, ie to prevent accidentally swapping stuff or ending up with the wrong editor and terminal combination.
What I think I would like is a way to 'glue' workspaces together, so that if I switch to workspace 1 I always get [1:1 ; 2:2], and if I switch to workspace 9 I get [1:9 ; 2:10]. Is this possible to configure? If not, would it be difficult to enable in the source?
Open question: am I strange that I think in this task-centered way? How do other people do task switching across multiple monitors?