Re: Window controls for GNOME 3

[Robert Park <rbpark exolucere ca>]

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 12:20 PM, Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me> wrote:
> So out of curiosity, what sort of  tasks do both you and Robert do if you
> don't mind me being nosy?

Oh, ok. Well, I'm an app developer and I have two physical displays.
Before I got the second display (nearly 10 years ago now) I was a
heavy user of workspaces, but since getting the second screen, I have
literally never once used more than one virtual workspace.

My typical workflow is like this: left screen contains a maximized
gedit window, right screen contains maximized firefox window. Both
will be open with many tabs at any given time (firefox displaying API
reference docs, and gedit editing various files for my current
project). Any non-maximized window, such as empathy chat window or a
terminal or whatever, goes onto the left screen. I never, ever need to
minimize anything because if there's ever anything that I don't want
to look at, I just bring gedit to the front and everything else
disappears.

Also, I should mention that the bottom 20% of my gedit window is a
terminal (thanks to gedit-plugins), but I also frequently have a
couple other terminals open as well. The terminal inside gedit is used
almost exclusively for launching my app (and running it's test suite),
while the other terminal windows are for compiling (so they can be
easily hidden behind gedit). Typically also my terminal windows will
be tabbed, because I'll start a long compile going in one, then open a
new tab to do something else, and then whenever I do something that
takes more than 30 seconds to complete I start a new tab in order to
continue working.

Hope that makes sense. ;-)

In terms of the overall vision of the new Gnome Shell, I'm really
enamored with it. I've *always* thought of the taskbar as something
clunky and I'm glad to see it go. Way way back before I could afford a
computer capable of running GNOME, I used to really like the Blackbox
WM (I'm talking GNOME 1.x days here). I'm a minimalist and I like
things to be as simple as possible. Blackbox has no taskbar and no
minimize button! Funny how we've come full circle with that ;-)

-- 
http://exolucere.ca