Hello,
I agree to Nadav's explanation and reasoning, and also enjoyed very
much reading it.
I wish to add my own POV, for whomever it might be interesting.
I use fvwm for around 10 years now. For some years, I didn't use its
"virtuality", mainly because it was slow to update on my home machine
(where I used it most of the time). Instead, I used X's virtuality
(the "Virtual" keyword in the Screen section). It's limited by the
physical RAM available to the video controller, but it's way faster
than any software (obviously). So I worked with 1600x1200, then,
when I bought a 8MB card, moved to 3000x2500, then moved back to
1800x2200x16bpp.
Now I work in tau, for 3 years, and 1800x2200 is simply not enough.
At home I mostly do one thing at once, but at work I do many things.
And, as Nadav said, once you get used to not minimizing windows you
can't go back. So I started using fvwm's virtual desktop - but
without the Pager. Instead, I defined Alt-{Right,Left} Arrow to move
between desktops, in a virtual desktop of 20x1 (used to be 10x1,
until one day all 10 were in use), and I usually know where I do what
and can find the needed window in much less than a second. Most of
my desktops have nicely-fitted (automatically, of course, by fvwm)
8 xterms, and usually one has mozilla (2 windows), one acroread
(2 windows) and one rdesktop, to connect to the Windows Terminal
Servers (again, 2 windows). I really can't imagine working now at
work without a virtual desktop of at least 6 desktops, and without
the keyboard shortcuts.
It does happen, that I open more than 8 xterms in a desktop, and
get overlaps. Then come to play other shortcuts I have - I have
a keyboard shortcut that *lower* the current window. Much much faster
than minimizing and then searching for the icon. Why? because,
contrary to *raise*, *lower* is reversible by repeating: I simply
press again (in my case, LeftCtrl-LeftAlt-button1), and get the
lowered window. That's another feature I find very missing from
Windows (does OSX have it? I don't know).
About refreshes: I still don't use opaque moves, so most of the
refreshes happen when I move between desktops. Of course, mozilla
and acroread refresh much slower than the xterms, but still fast
enough so that it won't bother me. My main machine is a PIII 733,
and the "su_toran" one (where I write this) is PII 300. Some of
the sutorans use KDE and GNOME, and I think are also quite happy
with its speed.
--
Didi
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