Re: Musings on debian-user list
On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 08:20:58PM EDT, John Hasler wrote:
> Chris Jones writes:
> > I guess so.. though I'm not sure about the usefulness thereof, save
> > for demo'ing the flexibility of, what's the word.. Window Managers..?
>
> Organization. I can have an FVWM "desktop" with a couple of dozen
> "panes" for each of umpteen projects. I can then, for rxample, switch
> quickly from the environment where I am working on Chrony, with a couple
> of Emacs instances, a debugger, an xterm running "tail -f" on a log,
> etc, to the desktop where I am studing music theory and have Noteedit,
> Solfege, etc running.
Yes John, but why would one need all shapes of xterms with extraordinary
dimensions to achieve this..? I mean, most terminal screen-oriented apps
assume some form of 4:3 geometry to begin with..
If you need the editor, a shell, a debugger, and a log tail displaying
concurrently on the one physical screen to achieve what you are working
one faster and more effectively, fine.. but as I hinted above, I suspect
that in most circumstances, having all that stuff visible on the same
display is often a case of showing off one's environment.. screenshot
feed, no more..
Sounds like you're talking IDE.. but correct me if I'm wrong, doesn't
text-mode emacs provide all of this, and more - even on a barebones
linux console..??
But never mind, what I really was saying is that I'm as much of an idiot
as the next guy for wasting huge amounts of time to set up, modify, etc.
my computing interface.. and all the same I often feel that better folks
than myself do not care too much about such aspects.
I mean.. I'm a mediocre hobbyist programmer, trying to make some sense
of some C code that clearly shows its age, via vim and gdb.. Now, do I
really need, am I really going to keep an eye on, half a dozen five line
xterms that tail all my system's logs while I chug along..?
In my case the tradeoff at this point is to have whatever I'm working on
full screen - with some form of split/windowed display when useful.. and
a minimal one-line last (status in gnu/screen parlance..) line of the
screen display a bunch of automatically refreshed counters that provide
me with a summary of what's going on in my system.. as much as I can
grasp in one eyeful.
And naturally use different X desktops in order to instantly switch to a
different environment as necessary.
Thanks,
CJ
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