onefixedstar | (no subject)

I was unusually grumpy when autumn first arrived. It's usually my favourite season, but for some reason, this year it just seemed too cold. Now, however, I'm loving it. I went running this morning and it was beautiful out--not too hot, not too cold, and leaves crunching underfoot everywhere.

I've decided that one of the features I would really like in Windows (or some alternate OS) is a project view. At the moment, I'm dividing my time between three separate projects, each of which requires multiple windows (e.g. OneNote for rough notes and outlines, a couple of Word files for previous and ongoing drafts, and Firefox for library searches). I like being able to jump back and forth between projects as I get bored or frustrated, but right now that means I either have to keep opening and closing the appropriate files, or leave everything open all the time, which is confusing and tends to leave my desktop uncomfortably cluttered. What I want is to be able to assocate a group of windows together and then hit one button and have it bring up all of the grouped windows while minimizing all of the others so that I can't see them.

In other geeky news, I finally got around to hooking up my LCD monitor to my laptop. I'm enjoying the extra real estate--double the screen space, double the pleasure. Well, maybe not double and maybe not pleasure, but I'm sure my productivity is up by a good ten percent. It would be more, but I'm spending quite a bit of time figuring out the most effective use for the extra space.

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What I want is to be able to assocate a group of windows together and then hit one button and have it bring up all of the grouped windows while minimizing all of the others so that I can't see them.

You can do that in Linux. KDE gives you four desktops, so you can have a group of windows open on each, and just choose your desktop based on which group of windows you want to work with. Moreover, you can "pin" certain windows to *all* of the desktops, so that regardless of which project you're working on, you can still have access to your MP3 player!

I'll bring my Knoppix CD home at Christmas so that you can see what I mean.

Or I see that I can download Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP and get the same effect. Ooh, another new toy to play with!

Redhat has the same thing, and so does Mandrake. I think it's a universal Linux thing.

I realized after I hit "Post Comment" that it was probably something common to all X11 Windows-based systems. But since I've never used any GUI other than KDE, I thought I'd go with what I know... Anyway, you can get KDE on Red Hat and Mandrake. :)

Oh yeah. Heh. See, I saw "Knoppix" and instantly stopped thinking. You're right, I use KDE on Mandrake, which is the funny part. I used XWindows on Redhat, though.