Workspaces: Working With Several Virtual Desktops

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Beam Deskbar Screen Terminal Vision

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The ampersand (&) allows the bootscript to continue on without waiting for the Workspaces "process" to finish.

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The sleep commands may be useful to give an application the opportunity to load fully before moving on.

Workspaces: Working With Several Virtual Desktops

You can use multiple workspaces to better manage open applications. It is common to have many applications running at the same time. When you run several applications on one workspace at the same time, the display can become cluttered. Zeta there fore comes with 9 workspaces as default, but you choose to have from 1 workspace till 32 workspaces. You can set the screen resolution and colour depth for each one of them. Each workspace can hold its own set of windows that you are working in.

Multiple workspaces allow you to open any number of applications and place them onto different work areas. You can easily switch in between the workspaces through the Workspaces application, or through:

+ to + for the first 9 workspaces.

You should use different workspaces to organize your work. For example, you can have Internet applications, such as an e-mail client and a web browser running on one workspace, and productivity applications, such as a word processor and spreadsheet application running on another workspace. The e-mail client Beam lets you set the workspace, which it will open in.

You can move a window from one workspace to another workspace to another by dragging its miniature representation in the Workspaces window. If the window that you are dragging, contains a picture, and the color depths on the workspaces are different, the picture will adjust to the new color depth in real-time. When you open a folder that's already open in another workspace, the window is brought into your current workspace, and is removed from the workspace it was in. However, if you select a window from the Deskbar's App Menu, you're taken to the workspace that the window is open in ("remote" windows are indicated by speedlines in the App Menu).

Advanced use of Workspaces
You can make Workspaces automatically start up as you boot Zeta. To do this, you will have to configure the UserBootscript (/boot/home/config/boot/UserBootscript).

To this script you should then add the following line:
/boot/beos/apps/Workspaces &

You can also launch various applications in various workspaces from the same UserBootscript. For example:

Workspaces 4
Terminal &
sleep 2
Workspaces 3
CodyCam &
sleep 2
Workspaces 0

Beware that adding automatic startups of the applications you use most to the startup script, will make the bootup session last longer.

You can switch from one workspace to another also from the command line, by simply typing for instance:

Workspaces 4

Be aware that that command will actually bring you to workspace #5, since workspaces are numbered starting with 0.

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