>> One question I have about MacOSX... does it have a virtual desktop
>> gizmo available out of the box and/or a decent add-on? The ones for
>> windows all suck and are annoyware. Of course, most of the suckiness
>> comes from windows' horrible scheduler under the hood.
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by a "virtual desktop gizmo". There are
> several aftermarket utilities available that provide the analogue to
> what on Smalltalk-80 was a "workspace", is that what you mean? I
> don't use any of them but others I know love them ... they seem to
> work well for those that use them.
>
> Godfrey
>
With pretty much any UNIX/Linux workstation running X in the past
15 years, the window manager allows for multiple "virtual desktops."
Basically, a collection of windows that appears on the screen at any time.
With the flick/click of the mouse or a keyboard hotkey, all windows
associated with the current "desktop" disappear, and all those associated
with the hotkey'd "desktop" appear. I run 10 on my dual-headed machine:
1: full of 10 virtual terminals for typing commands, compiling code,
running various things include the text-mode email client.
2: Full of web browser windows (generally 10-30)
3: Graphical email client on the same emailboxes.
4-5: Current research work (Matlab, mathematica, etc)
6: Classical music out of RealPlayer
7: Another 8 terminal windows for auxiliary compilations and projects
8-10: Misc for other graphical tangents (panoramas, etc)
With the flick of a hotkey, I hide *ALL* windows on any virtual
desktop and bring up all those on another. Thus, I go from "reading
email" mode to "surfing web mode" in about 0.2 sec.
Windows doesn't have this idea by default. The PowerTools in XP
allow for it (theoretically), but in practice it works very poorly. I
cannot, for instance, initiate a 5 minute Matlab computation in Workspace
3 and then switch to Workspace 1. The screen locks up until Matlab's done
redrawing the window (i.e. 5 minutes). The machine is unusable until that
is done.
I'm wondering if MacOSX has similar. Back when I was a MacOS
kinda guy (pre-MacOSX), I knew I could minimize a current application and
do somethign else in the background... at the expense of performance on
the backgrounded job..... but at least I could do it.
-Cory
--
*************************************************************************
* Cory Papenfuss, Ph.D., PPSEL-IA *
* Electrical Engineering *
* Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University *
*************************************************************************
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