Monday 29 June 2015

Elementary OS and Apps

Just a note about the odd looking screenshot.  I usually have one image spread across two monitors.  In this shot I have the same image on each screen, but the screens are each of vastly different size and resolution.  that's why the odd black sectio top and bottom.  :-)

A little further into usage of Elementary OS Freya and I am discovering more good bits.  One f the best bits of news is that as far as I recall, so far not one of my computers running Elementary OS has crashed.  Crashing on relatively old computers was one reason I moved away form KDE and Mint KDE.  Even XFCE was causing problems and Gnome.  Well I just had problems working wit it.  But so far Elementary has coexisted nicely with the various things I have changed to make it 'mine'.

I wrote previously about myt dislike for some aspects of the Plank dock, and that I have installed Docky.  One thing Docky gave me was the ability to scroll through my desktops using the mousewheel.  A neat thing about Elementary is that because it is using its own window manager and other bits, there is a small but devoted team writing applications just for it.  One of the Elementary App sites is here:
https://quassy.github.io/elementary-apps/apps/

And one of those Apps is a simple workspace switcher for the wingpanel indicator.  Now, this indicator is missing possibly the most useful component.  The ability to switch desktops with the mousewheel.  But on the other hand, what it does is let me swap between a fixed number of desktops, and dynamically added desktops.  While I wasn't a fan of dynamic desktops before Elementary Freya, I am now.

In the picture at the top of the page you might just be able to make out the workspace indicator (showing Workspace 1).  Here's a close up of the Workspace Indicator App.
And here it is open for switching to the next dynamically created work space.


 Here is the App with the preferences window open.

You can rename workspaces to reflect what you are doing on them at any given time.  So maybe Workspace 1 could be called 'Browsing', Workspace 2 might be called 'Graphics' and so on.  And of course, switch dynamic workspaces on or off.

As  mentioned.  It would be nice to be able to simply scroll the mouse wheel on the App and switch workspaces. 
But I'm sure the developer has either thought of that already and has a good reason not to implement it, or that I can make a few tweaks to the code myself.

Until then, it serves as a reminder of what workspace I am actually on at the moment, and as a way to set the workspaces to a definite number and rename them if I am doing say, web work on one and graphics work on another.
Finally, here's the link directly to the home page for this handy little tool.
http://dysonsimmons.com/indicator-workspaces/




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