Sometime on Aug 2, Mayuresh A Kathe assembled some asciibets to say:

Workspace - Literally what it means, a Work Space Not necessarily having any objects to manipulate Usually having some tools to start doing something Viewport - A view into a piece of data stored on your system Could be a file viewer, or a file system viewer Also, could be a view onto network services like, network neighbourhood, www browser... Desktop - The area of the screen (usually) visible to you for starting work. Also, a view into the Workspace.

I want to know the difference between these three with relation to window managers. In sawfish, one can have multiple workspaces, and multiple viewports in each workspace. I don't know yet where the desktop fits in there, but it does.

What I really want to know is, if I want 6 areas to work in, should I choose 6 workspaces with one viewport each, or one workspace with six viewports, or some combination?

Philip

On Fri, 3 Aug 2001, Philip S Tellis wrote:

Sometime on Aug 2, Mayuresh A Kathe assembled some asciibets to say:

...

Workspace - Literally what it means, a Work Space Viewport - A view into a piece of data stored on your system Desktop - The area of the screen (usually) visible to you for

I want to know the difference between these three with relation to window managers. In sawfish, one can have multiple workspaces, and

Quoting from the GNOME manual (you don't have the manual?):

Most window managers will give you the option of having multiple desktops, which are different from desktop areas. Desktop areas are virtual extensions of one desktop whereas multiple desktops are actually separate.

The default setup of GNOME is to use desktop areas with only one desktop. The reason for this is with some applications, such as those which use Motif, users can experience problems with some drap and drop functionality across desktops.

I suggest you install the GNOME manual.

Manish J.

on 2/8/2001 4:40 PM, Philip S Tellis at philip.tellis@iname.com wrote:

What is the difference between a workspace, a viewport and a desktop?

<disclaimer/>

To the best of my knowledge.

workspace: Some space for doing work. Generally, a workspace contains one or more related projects, each one having its own share of space. The "space" is conceptual; it could be on your filesystem, on your desk, or in your head.

viewport: A program's area of the screen. That's where the program draws. A viewport usually has its own co-ordinate system, which may be independent of the screen co-ordinate system. Sometimes, you have to translate from screen co-ordinates to viewport co-ordinates and vice versa.

desktop: The main area of the screen. The GUI environment draws within this area. When a window is maximised, it takes up the whole desktop (NOT the whole screen; the desktop may be smaller or larger than the screen). The desktop is the lowermost window in a windowing system. To see the whole desktop, you have to hide/close all other windows. The desktop is the parent of all windows.

Manish J.