I recently read z3bra's 2014 Avoid workspaces ( via ) which starts out with the tag "Virtual desktops considered harmful". At one level I don't disagree with z3bra's conclusion that you probably want flexible groupings of windows, and I also (mostly) don't use single-purpose virtual screens. But I do it another way, which I think is easier than z3bra's (2014) approach.

I've written about how I use virtual screens in my desktop environment , although a bit of that is now out of date. The short summary is that I mostly have a main virtual screen and then 'overflow' virtual screens where I move to if I need to do something else without cleaning up the main virtual screen (as a system administrator, I can be quite interrupt-driven or working on more than one thing at once). This sounds a lot like window groups, and I'm sure I could do it with them in another window manager. The advantage to me of fvwm 's virtual screens is that it's very easy to move windows from one to another .

If I start a window in one virtual screen, for what I think is going to be one purpose, and it turns out that I need it for another purpose too, on another virtual screen, I don't have to fiddle around with, say, adding or changing its tags. Instead I can simply grab it and move it to the new virtual screen (or, for terminal windows and some others, iconify them on one screen, switch screens, and deiconify them). This makes it fast, fluid, and convenient to shuffle things around, especially for windows where I can do this by iconifying and deiconify them.

This is somewhat specific to (fvwm's idea of) virtual screens, where the screens have a spatial relationship to each other and you can grab windows and move them around to change their virtual screen (either directly or through FvwmPager ). In particular, I don't have to switch between virtual screens to drag a window on to my current one; I can grab it in a couple of ways and yank it to where I am now.

In other words, it's the direct manipulation of window grouping that makes this work so nicely. Unfortunately I'm not sure how to get direct manipulation of currently not visible windows without something like virtual screens or virtual desktops. You could have a 'show all windows' feature, but that still requires bouncing between that all-windows view (to tag in new windows) and your regular view. Maybe that would work fluidly enough, especially with today's fast graphics.