A lovely undocumented feature for Linux writers!

[elfs]

One of the things they talk about a lot in GTD and productivity formus is eliminating distraction. You must drop the number of things which can grab your attention down to one, the ask at hand, in order to get things done.

There's an application for the Mac that accomplishes this by eliminating all of the other things on your screen except for the one application you're currently working on. The idea is that if you see only one window you're less likely to think of others on your workspace.

This isn't so easy for Linux users. A lot of us use multi-window managers, which has a common keysequence (Ctrl-Alt-Left or Ctrl-Alt-Right on mine) to switch from one window to the next. For men, I think, this is especially noxious because it permits a kind of channel surfing.

Since I have a laptop, I run Enlightenment instead of Gnome or KDE, and Enlightenment has one very nice feature: Alt-Return will disable the channel surfing ability and black out everything except your current window. Sweet! Something to consider for your linux laptop. It restricts your workspace down to a single window, which if you full-screened before you went there, gives you just about everything you need to write, and nothing you don't.

Comments

[casualprofessor.livejournal.com]

And you're blogging about Enlightenment... oh, the irony!

[ewhac.livejournal.com]

I've been using Windowmaker for far too long. I've played with Enlightenment, but I never quite "got it", never learned what it was about Enlightenment that made it so much better than Windowmaker. Also, it looked like it was focusing on eye candy just a little too much, and not enough on usability.

Oddly enough, I've formed an interest in the window managers ion3 (http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/) and wmii (http://wmii.suckless.org/), which some might say are the epitome of minimalism. But they embody a couple of interesting ideas, such as A) everything can be driven from the keyboard, and B) the window manager actually manages windows, i.e. you specify the layout in general terms, and the window manager rearranges everything to make maximal use of the display (often called a tiling window manager).

As for the "disable channel surfing" feature, I don't think that would slow me down much; turning it off to get to the mailer or web browser woulld eventually find its way into my motor memory.

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

For me, with ion, either it gets into my motor memory, or it's lost forever, only to be occasionally accessed by accident when I hit the wrong key.

[funos.livejournal.com]

That's how I manage my desktop. I use the LWM window manager which is extremely minimal. I take the habit of sizing my commonly used windows to fullscreen minus a couple pixels at the top so I can get to the root window and push/pop windows very quickly.