Why not go with virtual desktops instead of physical screens?
First off, I do use virtual desktops on the MacBook Pro, and I also use virtual desktops/consoles inside of VMs and on machines in the server closet. However, I am, generally speaking, not using virtual desktops on the 6 monitor machine. Sometimes I do keep 2 Spaces going when two very different coding activities are going on. But frankly, Spaces is pretty bad when you want the same application with different windows/documents in different spaces. I’ve used virtual desktops heavily in the past even on my primary coding machine. Mostly I need concurrency in what I am seeing. Watching cascading crashing, seeing a few gdb sessions + code, etc. Virtual desktops don’t solve the concurrent viewing. When I don’t need concurrent viewing, I use tabbed terminals quite a bit. Spaces works OK on the MacBook Pro with 2 displays because I am doing a bunch of different tasks such as writing reports, bug triage, email, PowerPoint, to-do list management with Things, Mail, WebEx, iTunes, etc. These vari
I do use virtual desktops. 🙂 I keep 2 Spaces going when two very different activities are going on. Sadly, Spaces is pretty bad when you want the same application with different windows/documents in different spaces. I’ve used virtual desktops heavily in the past even on my primary coding machine. Mostly I need concurrency in what I am seeing. Watching cascading crashing, seeing a few gdb sessions + code, etc. Virtual desktops don’t solve the concurrent viewing. When I don’t need concurrent viewing, I use tabbed terminals quite a bit. Of course, if I couldn’t afford a lot of monitors, I can work on a single 17″ monitor with 8 or so virtual desktops (and have done so)–but it really sucks. This lets me get through tasks a lot faster with less pain. Debugging is painful enough as it is–there’s no reason not to add as much hardware to ease the pain where possible.
