[Cialug] Tracking the Ubuntu beta distribution

[Nathan Stien]

On 3/1/07, Daniel A. Ramaley <daniel.ramaley at drake.edu> wrote:
> On Thursday 01 March 2007 11:33, Nathan Stien wrote:
> >I'm curious, what is it about the AfterStep pager that you like so
> >much?
>
> I set up several desktops, each one twice as wide and three times as
> tall as my monitor. To move to a different screen within one desktop i
> either just have to bump the mouse against the edge or hit a meta key
> (i'm using the Windows logo key for that purpose) plus an arrow key. To
> move to a completely different desktop i can hit a meta key plus
> pageup/pagedown or click on the Pager (and all those keystrokes are
> user-definable, i just set them to what i like). I've so far not found
> another window manager that has a pager that works as slick as the one
> in AfterStep.

I guess I was hoping there was some tremendous capability that
AfterStep's pager had that KDE's doesn't.  I used to have a pretty
similar setup under KDE, though I don't do the virtuallly-sized
desktops anymore.  I use win+arrow keys to move relatively between
(usually six) desktops, plus win+<num> to go to a desktop by absolute
index.

Perhaps you could expand on the ways in which the AfterStep pager is slick?

> It is also easy to configure what buttons show up in the title bar of
> each window. I have 5 buttons configured on each window. Each one
> responds differently depending on which mouse button is used to click
> it. And if i forget what mouse button does what on which button,
> hovering the mouse over it pops up a little help window.

Wow, 5 buttons x 3 mouse buttons... Now I'm very curious as to what 15
things you need to do with your windows at a single click!
Min/max/restore/close... rollup?  Send to desktop?  Always on top?

> AfterStep is also *fast*. My main machine at home (built in the summer
> of 1998, so approaching 9 years old) runs Debian Etch, and it would not
> be able to handle KDE or Gnome. But it runs AfterStep wonderfully.
> AfterStep isn't as fast as Blackbox or some of the others that are
> meant to be truly minimalistic, but for me it offers a good compromise
> between efficiency and features.

Oddly enough, one of my venerable machines at home (mostly a server
anymore though) runs Debian Sid and was built in 1998 (Pentium III 500
Mhz, 192 MB RAM).  It runs KDE just fine.  However, I would never
claim that KDE is faster or lighter! :-)  Surely your similarly-aged
machine is more efficient than mine.  However, in my case I find that
the bottleneck on it is usually Firefox-induced.

Thanks for sharing your setup, though.  Always curious to hear
different ways of doing things!


-- 
Nathan P. Stien
Consulting Engineer / Software Developer
Embedded Systems Electronics and Software
http://linkedin.com/in/nathanstien
Mobile: 309.241.2581