Gilbert Guttmann
Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

My ideal Spaces setup

When Apple announced Spaces for Leopard, I was not that excited. I’ve never been a fan of Virtual Desktops because I thought they would just distract rather than offer any use. You know, another one of these neat looking toy features.

I was so wrong.

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After Leopard shipped, I gave it a try and came out with a solution which enhances my work flow and productivity. It is basically just a three-row setup, but since its not that complex you don’t run into any “oh god damn where am I now” problems.

Spaces setup

Browser and anything else.

Spaces setup

Textmate.

Spaces setup

Two Terminal windows. Left is the running Rails application where I can quickly make out any weird stuff while watching the log. Right is cd’d to the application directory. Scripts, rake, Git, etc. fit perfectly here.

Using Control-1/3 to switch spaces is fast and simple. Heads-up to Apple for performance! Works flawlessly.

Conclusion

Simple and easy, nothing spectacular. But aligning my applications like this gives me the best solution for not losing the overview on one part of the development process.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Development, Tips & Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Gerhard on November 19th, 2008 at 6:50 pm

I always keep Textmate with Terminal (single window, multiple tabs). Works rather well when watching logs, using script/console and commiting - the super famous gc (git commit).

Second space is always the link to the outside world (Gmail, Mail, Campfire, browser) and third space is Photoshop/InDesign : ).

Oh, and fourth space is iTunes and Google Reader.

Joakim Andersson » Blog Archive » My ideal Spaces setup on November 20th, 2008 at 6:51 am

[...] My ideal Spaces setup | Wildbit. [...]

Gilbert Guttmann on November 20th, 2008 at 7:16 am

Gerhard,

I’ll probably try out a fourth space for Photoshop. But it might be too much. I’m using the first one for this because when I do Photoshop work, I usually switch off my coding mode :)

Jonathan Sharp on November 20th, 2008 at 5:24 pm

Nice setup, I use something very similar (I use space 4 for Photoshop also). I was crazy and tried a 5th space for VMWare since I run two instances for IE6/7 but that was too much.

The only application I “lock” to a space is Photoshop, the others I’ll leave as floating so they’ll stick to the active space that they open in.

My ideal Spaces setup

Conclusion

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