A simple matter of…

As I mentioned the other day, I’m going to be purchasing some monitors to replace my old trustworthy Iiyama visionmaster pro 450.

My normal way of working many years ago was:

• 1600×1200
• netscape or emacs full height at right hand side about 2/3 screen width
• three xterms arranged vertically down the left hand side

This used to work brilliantly, a little small font for xterm, but since I often used 9 xterms at once - arranged 3×3 in that case (lots of work on many boxes), it was very good. Best time was when I was using a 21″ monitor instead of a 19″ monitor. I then went to 3×19″ monitors (but the right hand monitor was rarely used).

However for the last few years I’ve been using just one screen - either 1400×1050 on the laptop or 1600×1200 on my 19″ CRT at home. This doesn’t work brilliantly. Firstly window managers these days seem too “clever” and try and remember where a window previously was (grrr). Secondly web pages used to (generally) just flow to fit you browser, but of course now they expect 1024×768 (vs my 700×1200). So I’ve ended up with overlapping windows. Also my eyes are feeling the strain of that small font.

So what should me new setup be?

• 2×19″ is cheapest - 2×135 = 270 ish
• 30″ is most expensive -900 ish
• 2×22″ is about 2×220 = 440 ish

With the 19″ I don’t think I could fit much sensibly beside the browser on the screen. Perhaps move fluff there such as IM chat windows (which I find a royal PITA since they take up so much space!) In fact, that seems okay.

Then move to 2×2 xterms on the other monitor to do work. I’d like to use something like multignometerminal, but out of all the various terminals out there, I always seem to have issues:

• no nice readable font
• corruption when you use non-standard colours (e.g. one column of pixels not being cleared)
• not working with unicode nicely :-þ
• anti-aliasing would be appreciated if it makes the font more readable (might not on an LCD)
• picking suitable colour scheme without getting problems when programs quit

I’ll also have to pick a colour scheme - I used to use black on pale green background (which I never had a problem with although everyone else did). At home I have grey on black (but it has to be a bold grey really to be readable). At work I have black on grey.

Alan has just said that he uses many desktop schemes. So for instance “mail” has evolution on one screen, firefox on another. “dev” might have xterms on one screen, firefox on another. I’ve never used such a scheme before - I currently have a virtual desktop which scrolls horizontally when I run out of screen estate. Normally when I want a few more xterms for a particular task, I just scroll half a screen to the right (so I’ve got browser + new xterms visible), then keep scrolling back and forth as required.

I think I’m going to switch off sawfish too as a window manager. It seems to be unsupported and has some stability issues - namely with amarok, and also with amarok the icon sometimes appears outside the panel (dunno whose fault that is).

Blimey, I’ve suddenly got back into blogging mood!