On Tue, Feb 14, 2006 at 06:14:15PM +0100, Adam Chodorowski wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Feb 2006 17:10:42 +0100, Giles Constant  
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 
> >On Tuesday 14 February 2006 16:03, John Robson wrote:
> >>A work colleague quite likes ion, but feels he would miss the little
> >>"desktop preview" function available in the gnome taskbar, showing what
> >>is running on each virtual workspace.

> >It hasn't got one, although I don't think it needs one - with Ion, you
> >generally think where you're going to open a window, then open it, rather
> >than open a window then try and think where to put it.

In my experience of pager use (long time Fvwm fan I am -- I use Fvwm on
my desktop and Ion on my laptop) is that most of the time you use it to
move yourself to a different workspace, and it's only sometimes that one
uses it to move windows around, and that's usually to move a particular
window to your current workspace temporarily.
 
> I think people actually mainly use such pagers to:
> 
> 1. switch workspaces quickly with the mouse (you could implement this in
>    Ion with a menu, but that's not as quick to use).
> 2. Quickly find the right window (only works if you have very few windows
>    in each workspace).

3. Quickly see which workspace you're currently in.  This can be helpful
if you tend to have workspaces with similar layouts/appearance (such as
three or four xterms arranged in a grid, as I do)

(I never did manage to get that "workspace indicator" script working --
has anybody made an up-to-date statusbar plugin to do that?)
 
> >In other words, you're far less likely to forget where your windows are,
> >because they're usually in the most appropriate place!
 
> This doesn't really work when you have 200+ windows open (like I normally  
> have). OTOH, a graphical pager is also completely useless in this case.  
> The most usable way for me to find the right window is query_gotoclient()  
> (ALT-G in the default bindings, if I remember correctly). [I also have  
> 100+ tabs (in roughly 25-30 windows) in Opera open, which makes  
> query_gotoclient() less usable, but a "normal" Ion configuration doesn't  
> scale that well to 400+ windows.]

Heh, you make my modest eight workspaces look trivial...

Kathryn Andersen
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