Re: [9fans] interesting(?) widgets idea

[Ethan Grammatikidis <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

MARGINS! Why is it all the computer nerds are obsessed with eradicating margins? Do they actually never try to read anything using the software they produce? OTHER than PDFs? I use a window manager with only 1-pixel side borders, and terminals with no scrollbar at all and margins reduced to virtually nothing by the idiot developers. I can't have two terminals overlapping if the right-hand one is on top; I can't read anything in it! That's not an increase of usable screen area, it's a reduction! Books printed as cheap as possible, where every penny counts in the manufacture, have margins!

I spent a long time badly wanting more screen area and eventually achieved it, only to come all the way back down again. My peak screen sizes were first a 21" CRT at 1600x1200. That was okay, I did different things in different parts of the screen, but really mostly only used about 30% of the area for my currently active task, the rest being little more than storage of windows. I had IRC chat constantly visible, but at the time didn't chat an awful lot.

My 2nd peak involved two screens, a 1680x1050 and a 1280x1024, the latter purchased very cheaply in my quest for more area. By this time I had an extremely active online social life and was also as involved as I could be with programming and open-source projects. I made myself ill, I felt horribly drained. I got nothing done. I had to remove the 1280x1024 monitor and put up with IRC being hidden whenever I wanted to concentrate on something in the slightest. Sometimes I would focus on IRC instead, but I wouldn't keep an eye on it all the time. I lost some net-friends by not keeping an eye on IRC all the time because I missed seeing when they were on, but at least I could get something done. Also, when I did catch up with my friends on IRC I could give them more time.

Now, I've come all the way down to a tiny 1024x600 screen, and except for missing out on the full height of some art, I'm quite happy! I check on the workspace with IRC exactly as and when I have attention to spare, rather than having it hinting at me out of the corner of my eye all the time.

I'll say one thing for huge screens. They make any window management model in the world seem all right. They crappiest window management systems are fine with a huge screen. This is with screens 1600x1200 and greater, 1680x1050 won't cut it with a crappy WM. :) At 1024x600, any window I'm doing anything serious in is maximized with no visible borders. I use WindowMaker because I can easily set any window to such full-screen maximization (I don't want it for all windows), and it retains a 1-pixel area along the top with iconify and close regions. Windows I'm not using are iconified, which notifies the program not to even try to draw into the window, an excellent idea, I think. I have no task bar, if I want to switch I iconify the window I'm working on and look up the one I want in the icon stack. Sometimes alt-tab is a better option, but not often. Miscellaneous junk tends to get run in the chat space where there is spare screen space to right-click the background. Sometimes I need a floating window over a browser, and that's perfectly natural, although it does require alt-tab (actually winkey-tab on my setup). The whole setup works, is efficient despite Windowmaker bugs, is pleasant to look at, and the only things which really bother me are looking at some art and the lack of margins in terminals and Gtk+ software produced by attention deficit teenagers who haven't been around long enough to learn better, and are determined to learn the hard way.

If you really are attention deficit -- I was terribly so when I started using Linux and would forget a short command in the process of switching from one VT to another (not kidding), then invest in a 1680x1050 monitor. I see one on ebay for £55, a very small investment unless you really are living in poverty to the point of struggling to buy enough food. You will have enough space for a 1024-pixel-wide browser window for documentation or whatever and two terminals next to it with nice clear text.

You know what? I used a Zaurus for reading plain-text ebooks for a long time. It had a 4" screen, absolutely bloody minute. Despite the screen being capable of rendering a very crisp 80 columns I used a larger font for a 63-column terminal, and on top of that adjusted my parameters to fmt and fed the output through sed to give me 2 columns of left margin and 3 columns on the right, just to make it nice to read, and it was very nice. None of this "I prefer paper books" for me, I don't need it, I just need margins. Books have margins.

Returning to the topic of the thread, a scrollbar can form a margin of sorts if it's not too bold. A left-side scrollbar would cure my present trouble with overlapping terminals and indeed does so on 9terms. Regular terminals are still a bit of a problem, for which I blame the extremely dense idiots working on LXDE, and me for trying LXDE without looking into what it was made of. :)