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View Full Version : What's the difference between workspacing and alt-tabbing?



guyver_dio
February 2nd, 2012, 12:12 AM
I've looked in a few threads and haven't found an answer. If I have a few windows open, I usually just alt-tab to change to the other. To change to a different workspace I imagine there's a shortcut similar to alt-tab or I can click the workspaces icon and select the one I want. But it's not any faster than just alt-tabbing. I really dont get the advantages. I get that it groups similar programs together, but chances are I'm most likely going to spend 90% of my time in one and only a few seconds if that in any of the others.

T2manner
February 2nd, 2012, 12:22 AM
ctrl+alt+arrow keys is the combo for workspace switching btw.

but alt-tabbing only switches between programs. workspace switching switches between workspaces.. if you wanted to get to a different workspace, but not a particular window, you'd change workspaces.
i think it's unproductive to be able to alt-tab to a window in a different workspace, but whatever.

EDIT:
there used to be advantages to different workspaces. you'd be able to group different tasks together, like you said. but now that the ability to alt-tab to different windows in different workspaces is there, it makes this almost reduntant.
so i see what you're saying now. maybe they'll update this in 12.04

Copper Bezel
February 2nd, 2012, 01:18 AM
Yeah, both Unity and Gnome Shell handle Alt+Tab differently from Gnome 2 or KDE. I can't stand the new application-group-driven Alt+Tab - it's completely counterintuitive. Of course, there's an extension in Gnome Shell and an option in Unity's Compiz to change the behavior back to switching between windows on the present workspace.

It's also worth noting that what workspaces do really varies between window managers. In Unity, each workspace is a desk, and you have to move into it to see the contents, but the dock shows windows from all workspaces. In Gnome 2, they're still desky, but you can only see the contents of the present workspace in the taskbar, and the workspace switcher has some representation of the apps running in each workspace. In Gnome Shell, and through a different method in KDE, workspaces are groups of tasks, and you can see the windows running inside them from the workspace switcher.

They serve different purposes. I would agree that Unity hasn't quite figured out what its workspaces are for, just yet; Mark Shuttleworth has said as much and commented that they might make the Launcher local to the current workspace.

If you're not using a large number of windows, particularly over a long period of time, then workspaces aren't necessary. The idea isn't to make any one window more accessible, but less, to keep windows you don't need right now out of the way and reduce the number of windows you have to sift through while working with a specific task. For instance, I keep a music player and a browser with my e-mail and voice accounts on one workspace, where I can ignore them when I'm not interacting with them directly, and then generally have two or three workspaces full of whatever else I'm working on. I might have one with my lecture notes and gradebook while I'm in class, but leave some documents I was working with before class on another workspace, or jump to another workspace while I'm browsing or researching at home to work on some batch of image files, etc. In other words, one task group is windows that I intend to shuffle between rather rapidly and work across, where I might stay on one workspace for thirty minutes or an hour.

It's just a way of keeping organized. At a peak, I might have fifteen windows open, spread across five or six workspaces. Most of the time, all of them are gedit, OpenOffice, and Chrome windows, so docks and app-driven Alt+Tabs are no help. Really, without workspaces, I'd have to close everything out for a particular task before starting another, then reload everything later - and that's just counterproductive.

It's also a nice alternative to having to minimize things, or dealing with weird little desktop widgets for e-mail, music players, etc.