[San-Diego-pm] virtual desktops for windows and mac
Tkil
tkil at scrye.com
Mon Aug 22 12:45:54 PDT 2005
This came up at Damian Conway's talk last week, and I said I'd post
links to the two packages I use. Sorry it took so long...
For OSX, I use "Desktop Manager":
http://desktopmanager.berlios.de/index.php
It works great, and is easy to configure; I tend to leave the pager
turned off, and put the four windows straight across on my
menubar. You can configure the different switching animations as
well. This is the package that Damian was using during his
presentation.
For Windows XP, I use "Virtual Dimension":
http://virt-dimension.sourceforge.net/
It's fast, and the only issues I've had with it are some strange
interactions with X-Win32 (but MSVDM had the same issues, so I
suspect it's just an impedence mismatch between the Win32 WM and
what X windows expects...)
I have four desktops, again lined up in a row, and I keep the pager
at the bottom-right corner of my screen. I make it fairly large,
so I can see the icons for the 10-20 windows I have open on each
screen, and it lets you move windows from one desktop to another
either by dragging their icons in the pager, or by right-clicking
any title bar (where it has added "move to desktop <whatever>",
"make transparent", "put on all desktops", etc.)
If you already have MSVDM installed, make sure you uninstall it
first, before installing Virtual Dimension; Bob can attest to the
unpleasant conflicts if you don't do so...
I used to use the Microsoft Power Toy Virtual Desktop Manager
("MSVDM"), but it was lacking in many ways: no easy way to move
windows between desktops, and I've had some substantial focus /
z-order issues with it. It's unsupported even by Microsoft; the only
advantage I can think of is that it lives in the actual task bar,
instead of being another window on the screen. *shrug* Anyway,
here's the URL for reference:
Very brief description:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx
Actual download link:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/whistler/Install/2/WXP/EN-US/DeskmanPowertoySetup.exe
Let me know if you have any questions. :)
Thanks,
t.
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