Some time back I read Simon Tatham's Policy of transience ( via ) and recognized both points of similarity and points of drastic departure between Tatham and I. Both Tatham and I use transient shell history, transient terminal and application windows (sort of for me), and don't save our (X) session state, and in general I am a 'disposable' usage pattern person . However, I depart from Tatham in that I have a permanently running browser and I normally keep my login sessions running until I reboot my desktops. But broadly I'm a 'transient' or 'disposable' person, where I mostly don't keep inactive terminal windows or programs around in case I might want them again, or even immediately re-purpose them from one use to another.

(I do have some permanently running terminal windows, much like I have permanently present other windows on my desktop , but that's because they're 'in use', running some program. And I have one inactive terminal window but that's because exiting that shell ends my entire X session .)

The big way that I depart from Tatham is already visible in my old desktop tour , in the form of a collection of iconified browser windows ( in carefully arranged spots so I can in theory keep track of them ). These aren't web pages I use regularly, because I have a different collection of schemes for those. Instead they're a collection of URLs that I'm keeping around to read later or in general to do something with. This is anathema to Tatham, who keeps track of URLs to read in other ways, but I've found that it's absolutely necessary for me.

Over and over again I've discovered that if something isn't visible to me, shoved in front of my nose, it's extremely likely to drop completely out of my mind. If I file email into a 'to be dealt with' or 'to be read later' or whatever folder, or if I write down URLs to visit later and explanations of them, or any number of other things, I almost might as well throw those things away. Having a web page in an iconified Firefox window in no way guarantees that I'll ever read it, but writing its URL down in a list guarantees that I won't. So I keep an optimistic collection of iconified Firefox windows around (and every so often I look at some of them and give up on them).

It would be nice if I didn't need to do this and could de-clutter various bits of my electronic life. But by now I've made enough attempts over a long enough period of time to be confident that my mind doesn't work that way and is unlikely to ever change its ways. I need active, ongoing reminders for things to stick, and one of the best forms is to have those reminders right on my desktop.

(And because the reminders need to be active and ongoing, they also need to be non-intrusive. Mailing myself every morning with 'here are the latest N URLs you've saved to read later' wouldn't work, for example.)

PS: I also have various permanently running utility programs and their windows, so my desktop is definitely not minimalistic. A lot of this is from being a system administrator and working with a bunch of systems, where I want various sorts of convenient fast access and passive monitoring of them.