[gentoo-user] workspace setups

[gentoo-user] workspace setups

[JD ATL LP]

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My first email from my new gentoo laptop!

I'm trying to figure out how these workspaces 'work'.
I want to setup one for business, and another for dev.
e.g. in the business space, i'd have office apps, stock ticker, etc
showing.
in the dev space, i'd have a program editor,web browser,etc.
is there some gentoo or wiki docs that give me a good intro in how to
customize these spaces?

Thanks for the input...

John D
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Re: [gentoo-user] workspace setups

[John Jolet]

Those workspaces are a feature of your windowmanager, not gentoo.  Which 
window manager are you using?  kde, or gnome, or what?
On Wednesday 31 August 2005 17:20, JD ATL LP wrote:
> My first email from my new gentoo laptop!
>
> I'm trying to figure out how these workspaces 'work'.
> I want to setup one for business, and another for dev.
> e.g. in the business space, i'd have office apps, stock ticker, etc
> showing.
> in the dev space, i'd have a program editor,web browser,etc.
> is there some gentoo or wiki docs that give me a good intro in how to
> customize these spaces?
>
> Thanks for the input...
>
> John D

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John Jolet
Your On-Demand IT Department
512-762-0729
www.jolet.net
john@jolet.net
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RE: [gentoo-user] workspace setups

[John Dangler]

Rats (I forgot to turn off mail on the win box)

Sorry - I'm using gnome atm

John D
 

-----Original Message-----
From: John Jolet [mailto:john@jolet.net] 
Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2005 10:25 PM
To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] workspace setups

Those workspaces are a feature of your windowmanager, not gentoo.  Which 
window manager are you using?  kde, or gnome, or what?
On Wednesday 31 August 2005 17:20, JD ATL LP wrote:
> My first email from my new gentoo laptop!
>
> I'm trying to figure out how these workspaces 'work'.
> I want to setup one for business, and another for dev.
> e.g. in the business space, i'd have office apps, stock ticker, etc
> showing.
> in the dev space, i'd have a program editor,web browser,etc.
> is there some gentoo or wiki docs that give me a good intro in how to
> customize these spaces?
>
> Thanks for the input...
>
> John D

-- 
John Jolet
Your On-Demand IT Department
512-762-0729
www.jolet.net
john@jolet.net
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RE: [gentoo-user] workspace setups

[W.Kenworthy]

What do you mean by "workspace"???  - multiple desktops via the pager?

BillK

On Wed, 2005-08-31 at 22:32 -0400, John Dangler wrote:
...
> Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] workspace setups
> 
> T
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RE: [gentoo-user] workspace setups

[John Dangler]

As in - workspace1 | workspace2 | workspace3 | workspace4
(bottom right of the task bar in gnome desktop)

I've figured out that if you open apps in one workspace, and then switch to
another, those apps don't appear, which does give me some idea of the
mechanics, but I'd like to customize what starts and what is available in
each one individually...

Thanks for the reply.

John D
 

-----Original Message-----
From: W.Kenworthy [mailto:billk@iinet.net.au] 
Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2005 11:22 PM
To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org
Subject: RE: [gentoo-user] workspace setups

What do you mean by "workspace"???  - multiple desktops via the pager?

BillK

On Wed, 2005-08-31 at 22:32 -0400, John Dangler wrote:
...
> Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] workspace setups
> 
> T
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Re: [gentoo-user] workspace setups

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Wed, 31 Aug 2005 23:58:36 -0400, John Dangler wrote:

> I've figured out that if you open apps in one workspace, and then
> switch to another, those apps don't appear, which does give me some
> idea of the mechanics, but I'd like to customize what starts and what
> is available in each one individually...

I don't know about GNOME, but in KDE you right click the window's
titlebar and select Advanced  -> Special window settings. Here you can
specify how the program opens its windows, including which desktop (or
all of them).


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Vuja De: the feeling that you've never been here before.

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Re: [gentoo-user] workspace setups

[Philip Webb]

050831 John Dangler wrote:
> As in - workspace1 | workspace2 | workspace3 | workspace4
> (bottom right of the task bar in gnome desktop)
> I've figured out that if you open apps in one workspace
> and then switch to another, those apps don't appear,
> I'd like to customize what starts & is available in each individually.

You must be completely new to any kind of Linux desktop (smile).

Workspaces -- or 'desktops' as a lot of us tend to call them --
are the basic way of organising your activities with Linux.
All (?) window managers have them & they work fairly uniformly.
I use KDE (also Xfce & Blackbox earlier) & have never used Gnome,
but have never noticed a significant difference in how they function.

I have  10  defined: (1) games, (2) user console, (3) editor, (4) e-mail,
(5) Internet (Firefox & Lynx usually), (6) Viewer (photos, maps),
(7) root console, (8) Gkrellm (system info), (9-10) spare, eg for work.
Your activities may be different, but that should give you an idea.

I find  2 - 3  apps running on any  1  desktop is enough:
you can minimise them to the taskbar or shade them to show only the titlebar.
You can move app windows to another desktop via R-click on the titlebar (KDE)
& KDE (I assume Gnome too) will restart apps on the same desktops
after you shut down & re-enter X (typically after an overnight power-off).
You can move between desktops via the pager in the panel (as you know)
or via Cntl-F1 etc (KDE) or via mouse-wheel on panel or empty desktop.
It's easy to create/remove new/existing desktops, tho' I never do that.
KDE allows you to have different backgrounds for each window,
eg I have a fiery orange-red for (7) root console: see your control centre.

HTH

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Re: [gentoo-user] workspace setups

[Holly Bostick]

Neil Bothwick schreef:
> On Wed, 31 Aug 2005 23:58:36 -0400, John Dangler wrote:
> 
> 
>> I've figured out that if you open apps in one workspace, and then 
>> switch to another, those apps don't appear, which does give me some
>>  idea of the mechanics, but I'd like to customize what starts and 
>> what is available in each one individually...
> 
> 
> I don't know about GNOME, but in KDE you right click the window's 
> titlebar and select Advanced  -> Special window settings. Here you 
> can specify how the program opens its windows, including which 
> desktop (or all of them).
> 
> 
That is a  'cool KDE feature' that GNOME doesn't have. Gnome =>v2,
anyway. Apparently Gnome 1.x (which used sawfish for its WM)
did have some capacities in this respect. However, as previously
mentioned, GNOME will remember what desktop a program was opened
on in the last session, if the session was saved with the program open.

But of course, all programs do not support saving their session state at
the close of session (Mozilla, Firefox and T-bird being noticeable among
this group), so that won't always help.

I can't believe no one has mentioned it, but this function (should you
choose to use it) is exactly what devilspie is for. It was designed to
attempt to recreate the window-matching properties of Sawfish for other WMs.

The prinicple is that devilspie watches (invisibly) for a window opening
event, and when one occurs, it compares the properties of that window to
the properties of the windows that you have said you want acted upon in
the config, and then acts upon the window as you specified in the
config. You have a fair amount of flexibility in what qualities of the
window you want matched (you could match all gaim windows, or only the
ones that have 'MSN' in the title) and you have a wide range of
operations you can perform on the specified window (send it to a
particular desktop, maximize/minimize./size to a particular size, make
sticky/pin on all desktops, set it to a particular location on the
desktop, etc).

The documentation is decidedly minimal, and it's a good thing to know
about 'xprop' to get the properties of application windows in the first
place, but the included sample and reference is enough to get started
with, and experimentation is not difficult. Certainly it works well and
does what it says on the tin, afaics (and I've been using it for some time).

However, as someone who has set up many applications to be on specific
desktops, I will say that you might find it not as useful as it seems at
first glance, depending on how you work. It can be quite distracting to
open a program-- let's say a file manager-- because there was a message
in a terminal saying 'look at thus and so file', and have the file
manager open on a different desktop than the terminal (because normally
you want the fm out of your way when you're working with it, but in this
case you don't). So such a configuration is somewhat constricting in
terms of using many applications.

But for applications that aren't used flexibly (like Thunderbird, which
I always open on desktop 1, so it's never in my way and I don't mind
switching desktops to check my mail while I'm waiting for an emerge to
finish), it can be useful.

HTH,
Holly
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