On My Desk I Have Three Screens
Posted on April 7th, 2006
Says Bill Gates in an article from CNN Money:
If you look at this office, there isn't much paper in it. On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you'll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.
The screen on the left has my list of e-mails. On the center screen is usually the specific e-mail I'm reading and responding to. And my browser is on the right-hand screen. This setup gives me the ability to glance and see what new has come in while I'm working on something, and to bring up a link that's related to an e-mail and look at it while the e-mail is still in front of me.
I thought about this setup in relation to my own, which is very much terminal console oriented and very much dependent on a "terminal multiplexer" called GNU Screen. I like my setup because it's fast and efficient. I can shift between workspaces by pressing either of two function keys. I can hop among my most frequently used email folders by pressing some other function keys lower down the line. Bash aliases make it easy to visit frequent folders in just a few keypresses-- for example, "cd /usr/local/apache/conf" becomes "ulac".
Aside from having one monitor instead of three, the one thing I can't mimic out of the Gates setup is being able to write an email while still being able to scan newly arrived and possibly more urgent messages. That doesn't translate well into terminal sessions and the Mutt email client. Or could it?
One solution would be opening a new terminal and starting a second instance of Mutt. That's a bit redundant though-- now you've got two email clients running and need to remember which one is primary and which one is temporary (which becomes harder the longer it takes you to complete your original task and the more interruptions you have along the way). A web-based view of your email could work too, but even this could interfere with redundancy as a new browser tab or window is devoted to information you'd normally access through a separate application.
The only other approach I can think of for referencing multiple messages while composing a response would be to tag everything you were going to use, save each one as text, then reply to the target message and load in those supplemental files and either split the screen to view all of them at once or copy and paste into one long document. Assuming of course that you can switch between multiple files while composing a response-- mutt's ability to invoke Emacs or Vim makes this possible.
Still, it's not quite the same level of utility as being able to print out several pages, spread them out on your desk, and arrange everything by hand.