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Top-Left Magic Corner Desktop Paradigm

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Re: Top-Left Magic Corner Desktop Paradigm

#41

Post by chrisco255 »

BirAdam wrote: post #12

I’ve wanted the LG DualUp for a long time. https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-28mq780-b This is due primarily to hating having tons of horizontal and very little vertical… which just seems stupid for the content we all deal with most of the time. If you’re the average person, you cruise Facebook half the day and use Google Docs for the other half (I’m exaggerating, but you get it) and in either of those your vertical…

I use hydraulic arms on two 24 inch monitors, and often have one monitor horizontal and the other vertical. The vertical monitor is pretty good for chat / feed based websites & apps. Also not bad for docs. And pretty good for code as well (I can see more of a file's structure at once).

Re: Top-Left Magic Corner Desktop Paradigm

#42

Post by etrautmann »

masswerk wrote: post #36

BTW, you can set the orientation of the Dock in Mac OS, but it will be always centered at the edge it's attached to. (So you can't pin it to a corner like the top left, nor can you force it to extend over the full length of that edge.) And you can extend the Dock in many ways, by adding folders or stacks, make them behave as menus or grids, ect.

Yep, and auto-hide the dock. I use an application launcher + cmd-tab for virtually everything

Re: Top-Left Magic Corner Desktop Paradigm

#43

Post by alanbernstein »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #8
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #2

As a teenager, I always put the Windows task bar on the left, under the logic that vertical space was more important than horizontal space for reading text. (Yes, this is the sort of thing I thought about as a teenager.) As an adult, I've switched back to the bottom. Teenage-me's reasoning wasn't wrong per se, but in practice I feel 16:9 screens already provide sufficient vertical space, whereas I like having more ho…

Some screens have enough vertical space—16:9 ain't included unless ginormous.

This confuses me. The aspect ratio is independent of the absolute resolution.

Re: Top-Left Magic Corner Desktop Paradigm

#44

Post by alanbernstein »

I agree with all of this, but after ~15 years of using desktop Ubuntu, I have almost completely given up on any UI customization. It never lasts more than a few years before design trends shift and something breaks. It's just not worth my time.

Maybe another distro would work out better. I'm not opposed to switching, but I don't have the time to invest in exploring other options. I still sorta know where a find a bunch of weird settings and stuff in Ubuntu, so it would be a bit of a pain to lose that knowledge.

Re: Top-Left Magic Corner Desktop Paradigm

#45

Post by fingerlocks »

toast0 wrote: post #37
threads2 wrote: post #16

I set the Mac OS dock to auto-hide and it frees up, like, an inch of space. Blows me away when I see people with the default-sized dock always open. Any real reason for this?

Auto-hide makes the edge a dead zone... Can't interact with things there because something might shift in and take the interaction. (Not that I like the Mac dock anyway, but the same principle applies to auto-hide in other settings as well).

You can set the dock size to be uselessly tiny so it’s basically invisible with auto-hide. It’s great, you have to really try hard to find it.

    defaults write com.apple.dock tilesize -integer 1; killall Dock.

Re: Top-Left Magic Corner Desktop Paradigm

#46

Post by JonathonW »

masswerk wrote: post #36

BTW, you can set the orientation of the Dock in Mac OS, but it will be always centered at the edge it's attached to. (So you can't pin it to a corner like the top left, nor can you force it to extend over the full length of that edge.) And you can extend the Dock in many ways, by adding folders or stacks, make them behave as menus or grids, ect.

You used to be able to pin it to a corner-- it was removed in 10.10 (IIRC along with a rewrite of the Dock itself) and never came back. Which is unfortunate, because a top-aligned Dock (on one of the sides of the screen) is way more predictable than the center-aligned Dock; pinned items never moved (unless it overflows and items start shrinking) when the Dock was top-aligned.

Re: Top-Left Magic Corner Desktop Paradigm

#47

Post by masswerk »

JonathonW wrote: post #46
masswerk wrote: post #36

BTW, you can set the orientation of the Dock in Mac OS, but it will be always centered at the edge it's attached to. (So you can't pin it to a corner like the top left, nor can you force it to extend over the full length of that edge.) And you can extend the Dock in many ways, by adding folders or stacks, make them behave as menus or grids, ect.

You used to be able to pin it to a corner-- it was removed in 10.10 (IIRC along with a rewrite of the Dock itself) and never came back. Which is unfortunate, because a top-aligned Dock (on one of the sides of the screen) is way more predictable than the center-aligned Dock; pinned items never moved (unless it overflows and items start shrinking) when the Dock was top-aligned.

Well, UX, as in "appearance first". (My own pet grief is about the loss the of custom icons in the Finder's side bar. I relied much on those for quick navigation. Now, I have to read… I've still an old Power Mac with an old OS around, and I'm much faster on this one than one any newer machine.)

Re: Top-Left Magic Corner Desktop Paradigm

#48

Post by philsnow »

lukasb wrote: post #39
somat wrote: post #33

It is a good article but only starts to go into features I consider important for an efficient desktop system. Select/single click paste. This is the big one. it turns copy/paste from a deliberate action to a natural motion. It always surprises me how infuriating going back to hotkey copy/paste is. Point to focus. Point your mouse at what window you want to be active. Not a huge deal but it goes well with the next po…

I admit, I was skeptical when I started reading your comment, by the end I was thoroughly convinced. Even with good hotkeys for tiling window management and switching, there's still a lot of friction in my setup. Envious since I probably can't replicate all of your features on MacOS.

> Envious since I probably can't replicate all of your features on MacOS.

Don't raise on click: if you can remember to cmd-click, this mostly works, even with right-clicking. The window receives the click and doesn't raise.

Point to focus: you can get this with yabai [0]; note that it recommends disabling SIP (and keeping it disabled) so that it can install some hooks into Dock.app, but you don't need to do that if you only want focus-follows-mouse.

select/single-click paste: you can get pretty far with hammerspoon (hs.eventtap to notice mouse drags, double-, and triple-clicks, and then use hs.uielement to get the text that is selected), but it's handicapped by apps that don't play nicely with accessibility (browsers and electron apps in particular come to mind). [1] has an alternate way which notices selections as above and then uses hs.eventtap to send synthetic cmd-c keydown/keyup events, but I haven't tried it.

edit: now that I think about it, I think you might be able to do the don't-raise-on-click behavior with hammerspoon as well, by capturing click events, checking their `mouseEventWindowUnderMousePointer` property (see [2]), and if that is not the window that is currently focused, block that event and send a synthetic copy with cmd- added (and if cmd- is already in the mod mask, treat it as "I want to raise that window" and do the opposite -- block the event, copy it and remove the cmd- modifier, and post that synthetic event)

[0] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai [1] https://github.com/Hammerspoon/hammerspoon/issues/2196#issue... [2] https://www.hammerspoon.org/docs/hs.eventtap.event.html#prop...

Re: Top-Left Magic Corner Desktop Paradigm

#49

Post by greendude29 »

Highly subjective based on personal preferences.

I use Gnome and the top bar is far from a checkbox for stylistic design for me. On it are applets that I use multiple times everyday (Calendar, Caffeine, a few custom applets, VPN controls, etc).

The author assumes that utility would come from something like a global menu which is also a choice, as I access menus only using the keyboard and not mouse.

I do love the magic corner though.

Re: Top-Left Magic Corner Desktop Paradigm

#50

Post by dsr_ »

alanbernstein wrote: post #44

I agree with all of this, but after ~15 years of using desktop Ubuntu, I have almost completely given up on any UI customization. It never lasts more than a few years before design trends shift and something breaks. It's just not worth my time. Maybe another distro would work out better. I'm not opposed to switching, but I don't have the time to invest in exploring other options. I still sorta know where a find a bun…

Don't give up hope. I've been using Debian since 1999 or so -- whenever 2.1 came out -- and my changes to desktop have been driven by technology affordability rather than fashion.

I've been using XFCE since 2003ish. On a laptop, I put all the panel business on the right hand side. On a multiscreen desktop, I use the tops of each display, with different things on each, with dynamically informative things on the left and application shortcuts on the right. On a giant screen, I maintain the same concepts as multiscreen but typically use the "smart hiding" feature on the right side panel, plus a corral for minimized applications.

Focus follows mouse; windows don't overlap. On a laptop I generally want no more than 2 windows per virtual screen, and the ability to flip through them very quickly. On a desktop, again: dynamic on the left, static on the right.

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