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Comment by abstractbill | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure my desktop would look pretty stark to most people. That's the way I like it though. Basically I only ever have two windows open, both maximized - Emacs and FireFox. I spend 90% of my time in Emacs - this is what it looks like:

http://abstractnonsense.com/desktop.png

(that's not my code btw - it's a random python library).

If I knew of a way to hide even more superfluous stuff (window decorations, the menu bar) I would do it.

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Wow - couldn't you squeeze in some more emacs windows on the right to visit more files at once? Or is that kind of thing just noise/distraction? I could certainly see some people preferring the simplicity to my more noisy 3 emacs windows and 4 rxvt's.

Yup, it's just noise to me. I prefer to have the other buffers loaded in Emacs, but not displayed on the screen where I'll be distracted by them.

My perfect dev environment would go as far as blanking out everything in my peripheral vision too - maybe a set of VR goggles that only displays an Emacs window, dead center ;-)

I do the single plain window of emacs thing too (though I use Terminal, not the built-for-mac Emacs GUI, and I only go 90 chars wide on my window). I usually run three UNIX shell buffers inside of emacs, in addition to all the source code buffers. I never go to the mouse while in Emacs (because it doesn't do anything), which helps me move quickly.

<snobbery>I get a bit frustrated when I need to look over someone's shoulder while s/he is doing some programming related task. So many people move very slowly thru their environments. I want to show them the way...</snobbery>

I wasted about 2 hours of my life once trying to trick out my Mac to be that "one Emacs window and nothing else" setup that you're talking about. I never really found anything that worked, though.

This may seem like an obvious point, but have you tried Linux (or another Free OS) with a tiling window manager? OS X does give you a nice prepackaged experienced, but if you love to tinker and have complete control to customize anything, Linux is ideal. And you can always dual boot, if you just want to try it out part time. =)

The thing is, when I'm doing anything but programming (web surfing, watching a DVD, playing music, etc.) I want the smooth, easy-to-use, pleasant-looking experience that I get on a Mac. I periodically try Unix window managers to see how they're doing, but they honestly always seem pretty clunky to me.

But let's say for a minute that I did go the Unix window manager route. What would you recommend if I wanted to have one "mode" where basically everything is stripped away (no menu bar, no windows, nothing -- just a shell), and another mode which was your standard GUI? It would have to be fast to switch between the two.

Install X11 on your Mac and set it to run in fullscreen mode. Then install xemacs or whatever and you're set. When you're in X11, fullscreen programming. When you Cmd-tab away, OS X goodness.

If you want a tiling WM, ratpoison runs just fine under X11.app on the Mac -- and you can have it replace the standard Quartz WM via .xinitrc

Switch to Linux :)

http://akkartik.name/desktop.html

That's an utterly bizarre font you're using - otherwise... nice!

I like modd. No other font is as legible at 9pt. I like that 0 and O look different, as do 1 and l. I like that all characters have some slight asymmetry - characters with character ;)

http://www.jmknoble.net/fonts

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