That's crazy. I actually set my virtual desktops up exactly as he described in VirtuaWin, back in the day. The advantage he doesn't talk about directly is that

That's crazy. I actually set my virtual desktops up exactly as he described in VirtuaWin, back in the day. The advantage he doesn't talk about directly is that if you're using a virtual window manager that doesn't have a notion of physical space (ie, it just has jump-to-desktop hotkeys, there's no "go up/down/left/right" hotkey), you can still configure it in a pseudo-physical layout using this trick by mapping each space to an arrow key. Obviously it doesn't map very well to n>4 spaces, but you could always have a Zelda-style "shadow world" with a different modifier key + up/down/left/right to get 8.