Re: Re: [dwm] dwm-1.7.1

On Thu, Sep 28, 2006 at 04:12:49PM +0000, David Tweed wrote:
> In my experience, dual-head doesn't combine flawlessly
> with the "zoomed & stack" approach because of human
> issues. Firstly, (I'd imagine that like me) most people with multihead
> setups have them to display more things, rather than the
> same numbers of things bigger. Certainly I tend to find myself using
> two/three "full length" columns and maybe just one "slave" column
> quite a lot. Secondly, if you put two screens
> with the join directly in front of you you really want to be
> able to put the stuff you're primarily working on near the centre rather
> than always off on the far left. Thirdly, even if you have one
> "zoomed-ish" client it's still useful to be able to rearrange
> the order of "slave" clients, eg, so you can put two things
> you want to compare by flicking your gaze between them
> close together. Lastly, again with this extra space you might want
> to use a mix of "naturally tall clients" (eg, text windows) and
> "naturally wide clients" (eg, time series graphs) on one view.
>
> I've tried to partly address these issues in my large numbers
> of clients patch (such as in the still flakey "move client to
> position x in displayed clients" functionality), but I'm not
> particularly satisfied with the result; the patch is a hack to make
> things more usable for me without completely rethinking
> the layout, its code and implications from scratch. That'd be
> very interesting to do, but I myself don't have time at
> moment.
>
> Note that this is just pointing out that with multihead the
> "human issues" are at least as important as extending
> the single-head paradigm in a logical and consistent way.

Well, I think we have very different working environments. I
prefer to have 5 clients at maximum in my view, otherwise I
cannot concentrate on what's going on anymore. Sometimes I throw
a glance on what's going on in a different view through toggling
a tag, but that's the only scenario when I have more clients
than 5 around.

That's maybe why I still stick with a single-head setup (and I only
consider switching to a 21" display with 1960x1200 pixels
instead using 2 screens in the future - those widescreen displays
are quite cheap already).

In a setup with many windows opened, I imagine you need a
totally different approach, but I doubt this scales well with the
design decisions in dwm, out of curiosity, did you tried
gridlayout?

Regards,

-- 
 Anselm R. Garbe  ><><  www.ebrag.de  ><><  GPG key: 0D73F361