Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 31st May 2007 21:08 UTC
"If you use a traditional desktop like GNOME or KDE, a keyboard-controlled desktop with a minimum of utilities may seem like stepping back 10 or 15 years in the history of interface design. Why bother, when traditional desktops are easy to use and RAM and disk space are so cheap nowadays?" On a related note, there is a new release of xmonad, a tiling window manager for X, written in Haskell. It now has full Xinerama and XRandR support, so you can add, remove, or rotate monitors on the fly.
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Member since:
2005-11-13
A keyboard controlled desktop is entirely possible (i'd even say awesome) in kde. Here's is how i actually do stuff:
win+t Focus kontact
ctrl+2 Switch to the mailpart of kontact
ctrl+l Check mail
ctrl+alt+n launch konversation
win+k Focus konqueror
Ctrl+l focus addressbar
type url hit enter
Either:
Ctrl Shows 40 small indicators on the 40 first links on the page so that i can hit the corresponding key to open the link
Or:
Hit the ' key and type in the text in the link, F3 to cycle
(That's right, mouseless browsing)
alt+f2 opens run-dialog, start a new program (always faster than going to the K menu if you know what program you want)
Almost all controls in normal apps are accessible through alt+key shortbuts aswell.
This is just an example of how my workflow is, i rarely if ever use the mouse. At school i always get comments on 'movie like' it looks when i just hit keys on the keyboard and things happen that would normally need to be controlled by mouse.
Granted, things aren't perfect in kde, probably half of my 40 kde bugreports are keyboard related, but things are a lot better than what i have been able to accomplish on gnome. With the input action kcontrol thing, dcop and window specific rules-controlled keyboard shortcuts are amazing.
Once your used to hitting win+key to switch between apps you never want to go back to alt+tab or expose, they are just to slow.
Edited 2007-06-01 09:49