Never used them in my life and I’ve been machine computing over 25 years. Always one monitor, one desktop. I close shit I dont need regularly, I click on icons on the tab bar to get to the app I need. The tab bar is wide enough to hold like 30+ of them. Why do I need more than one desktop? Windows go over another, the tab bar shows everything I have open. Why switch? I never got it.
Tiling WMs are just faster. So much faster. They remove so much annoyance it’s really hard to put it to words. Binding programs to workspaces is what finally sealed the deal for me.
I see it like this: alt+tab only toggles among the two latest things, on a 3x3 grid win+arrows, on a tidy usage of some fixed desktops (one for browser, one for mail, one for current subject…), you have inmediate swaps to multiple relevant programs, not just the latest which also mutates… also it adds some visual mental distribution which I find extremely efficient… never went back and I struggle/frustrate with looking for stuff in a fixed bar… (I had to use quite often both types, so I feel the difference)
If you keep holdind alt while pressing tab multiple times it will cycle over every open window, not only the latest two. You just have no not release alt before you reach the window you want, otherwise it restarts the cycling with the new order of most recently used windows.
Well, they mean with one keypress or at least fairly quickly. Like, I don’t know, maybe you keep in your working memory which windows you had used and then can just hit Alt+Tab+Tab+Tab without looking.
But yeah, as soon as you have to look at the individual windows while switching, it’s gonna take longer and particularly also kind of take you out of your current task.
I just use an alt+tab, uh… skin(?) that is a list of all of my open windows in the middle of the screen. Alt+tab scrolls through them, and as each one is highlighted, it’s brought to the front of the screen.
If I have more apps open on at same desktop I can switch to other apps without disturbing the setup. So for example I have a terminal with build output, my app in a browser and inspector open at the same time. I can switch to all the other apps without moving any of it. I just jump back to this workspace and everything is still in the same place. With single desktop if I switch to Firefox I have to bright all 3 windows to the top separately.
With two monitors I can have documentation open in a browser right next to my IDE, both fullscreen. Or have the IDE and my app open. Or a website and it’s logs. Or IDE and Postman. I have multiple firefox windows and terminals open at the same time. This doesn’t work well with single monitor/single desktop because it’s hard to keep track which window is which. If you only use one app at a time (like you only switch between firefox, steam and spotify) one desktop is perfectly fine. When you do bunch of stuff at the same time it gets messy real quick.
Never used them in my life and I’ve been machine computing over 25 years. Always one monitor, one desktop. I close shit I dont need regularly, I click on icons on the tab bar to get to the app I need. The tab bar is wide enough to hold like 30+ of them. Why do I need more than one desktop? Windows go over another, the tab bar shows everything I have open. Why switch? I never got it.
Tiling WMs are just faster. So much faster. They remove so much annoyance it’s really hard to put it to words. Binding programs to workspaces is what finally sealed the deal for me.
Alt+tab (and alt+shift+tab) is all you need imo.
Ctrl+tab for paging through browser tabs is helpful too.
I see it like this: alt+tab only toggles among the two latest things, on a 3x3 grid win+arrows, on a tidy usage of some fixed desktops (one for browser, one for mail, one for current subject…), you have inmediate swaps to multiple relevant programs, not just the latest which also mutates… also it adds some visual mental distribution which I find extremely efficient… never went back and I struggle/frustrate with looking for stuff in a fixed bar… (I had to use quite often both types, so I feel the difference)
If you keep holdind alt while pressing tab multiple times it will cycle over every open window, not only the latest two. You just have no not release alt before you reach the window you want, otherwise it restarts the cycling with the new order of most recently used windows.
This is simply untrue in KDE. Can’t speak for Windows or other DEs.
Well, they mean with one keypress or at least fairly quickly. Like, I don’t know, maybe you keep in your working memory which windows you had used and then can just hit Alt+Tab+Tab+Tab without looking.
But yeah, as soon as you have to look at the individual windows while switching, it’s gonna take longer and particularly also kind of take you out of your current task.
I just use an alt+tab, uh… skin(?) that is a list of all of my open windows in the middle of the screen. Alt+tab scrolls through them, and as each one is highlighted, it’s brought to the front of the screen.
If I have more apps open on at same desktop I can switch to other apps without disturbing the setup. So for example I have a terminal with build output, my app in a browser and inspector open at the same time. I can switch to all the other apps without moving any of it. I just jump back to this workspace and everything is still in the same place. With single desktop if I switch to Firefox I have to bright all 3 windows to the top separately.
With two monitors I can have documentation open in a browser right next to my IDE, both fullscreen. Or have the IDE and my app open. Or a website and it’s logs. Or IDE and Postman. I have multiple firefox windows and terminals open at the same time. This doesn’t work well with single monitor/single desktop because it’s hard to keep track which window is which. If you only use one app at a time (like you only switch between firefox, steam and spotify) one desktop is perfectly fine. When you do bunch of stuff at the same time it gets messy real quick.