The Mandelbear's Musings

Blame allisona -- she asked "It's a classic, but always fun: What's on YOUR computer desktop right now? Any particular reason you decided to put that picture/photo/design there?"

So I just had to take a screenshot, which I turned into an icon. My answer was:

Right now my computer desktop is solid blue. I figure it's silly to put anything on a desktop that's almost entirely covered by windows, although I occasionally use phase-accurate Earth or Moon images.

At the moment there's a web browser, two editor windows, two terminals, a system monitor, two clocks, a load grapher, a mail indicator, my "console" terminal, and the desktop switcher. The manual browser and calendar are iconified (a Windows user would call them "minimized". So that's, um, 12 windows on this desktop. It's cheating a little, since all but the editors, terminals, and browser are small and shared with the other desktops. I have 5 other desktops (the desktop switcher I use on the Mac calls them "rooms") with from one to four terminal or application windows.

And the browser, Firefox, currently has 8 tabs active.

I've been using essentially the same desktop layout for 15 years now, both at home and at work.

Linux geeks will want to know that I use ctwm, which is still available as a Debian package. The browser and one of the Emacs windows are completely overlapped; I select them by moving the cursor into the appropriate tab. Focus follows mouse; most apps autoraise on focus. I use conditional compilation in .Xdefaults to adjust geometries for screensize.