For the software development aspects of my work, I've developed a strong aversion to manual mouse-based management of overlapping windows, as provided by the tr

For the software development aspects of my work, I've developed a strong aversion to manual mouse-based management of overlapping windows, as provided by the traditional Mac, Windows and Linux desktop environments. They require too much manual effort to position/resize/organize windows, which are IMO a dated skeumorphic affordance which provides limited productivity. That starts to matter more when you are dealing with early symptoms of RSI. Instead, I've found that a tiling WM like XMonad[1] + its virtual desktops is a great way to organize my separate tasks and minimize extraneous window management. Each workspace contains the "windows" for a particular long running task, and if I ever need more screen real estate for a particular window, I cycle through the layout modes until I find one that works - usually just a few key presses away. However, unlike the author, I keep my non-programming compute tasks (email, media, etc.) separate from my programming tasks by using a traditional desktop environment for those, because there are a lot of things in the traditional desktop that are optimized for those tasks (i.e. desktop notifications, media controls, etc.) This requires running 2 different machines, but there are plenty of good ways, either via hardware or software, to make the switches between the two environments mostly seamless. [1] https://xmonad.org/ https://xmonad.org/