Top-Left Magic Corner Desktop Paradigm

As a teenager, I always put the Windows task bar on the left, under the logic that vertical space was more important than horizontal space for reading text. (Yes, this is the sort of thing I thought about as a teenager.)<p>As an adult, I&#x27;ve switched back to the bottom. Teenage-me&#x27;s reasoning wasn&#x27;t wrong per se, but in practice I feel 16:9 screens already provide sufficient vertical space, whereas I like having more horizontal space to keep multiple windows open at a time. When I was a teenager, I usually just kept everything in full screen anyway.

It is a good article but only starts to go into features I consider important for an efficient desktop system.<p>Select&#x2F;single click paste. This is the big one. it turns copy&#x2F;paste from a deliberate action to a natural motion. It always surprises me how infuriating going back to hotkey copy&#x2F;paste is.<p>Point to focus. Point your mouse at what window you want to be active. Not a huge deal but it goes well with the next point.<p>Don&#x27;t raise on click. usually I want a window where I am looking something up. And a window I am working in. I hate it when the window I am working in jumps to the top on focus obscuring the window I am looking at. It should only raise when I click a specific spot(usually the border).<p>If you get this far you realize that overlapping windows are not doing much for you. so you start using tiling window managers. Unfortunately some applications interact badly with tiling window managers. If you have such an application you may never reach this point of desktop efficiency.

I have the top-left corner on MacOS set to act as a &quot;hot corner.&quot; Whenever my mouse goes there, it triggers exposé, showing all my windows to me. I got the habit from using gnome3, which does this by default, and find it quite handy with muscle memory.

BTW, you can set the orientation of the Dock in Mac OS, but it will be always centered at the edge it&#x27;s attached to.<p>(So you can&#x27;t pin it to a corner like the top left, nor can you force it to extend over the full length of that edge.)<p>And you can extend the Dock in many ways, by adding folders or stacks, make them behave as menus or grids, ect.

I agree with all of this, but after ~15 years of using desktop Ubuntu, I have almost completely given up on any UI customization. It never lasts more than a few years before design trends shift and something breaks. It&#x27;s just not worth my time.<p>Maybe another distro would work out better. I&#x27;m not opposed to switching, but I don&#x27;t have the time to invest in exploring other options. I still <i>sorta</i> know where a find a bunch of weird settings and stuff in Ubuntu, so it would be a bit of a pain to lose that knowledge.

Highly subjective based on personal preferences.<p>I use Gnome and the top bar is far from a checkbox for stylistic design for me. On it are applets that I use multiple times everyday (Calendar, Caffeine, a few custom applets, VPN controls, etc).<p>The author assumes that utility would come from something like a global menu which is also a choice, as I access menus only using the keyboard and not mouse.<p>I do love the magic corner though.

Agree with most but I&#x27;ve been using <i>right</i> side taskbars since Windows 98 owing to screen real estate (more width to spare for a taskbar than height has to spare).<p>Now why &quot;right&quot; side? Well because I&#x27;m right handed, scrollbars are right side, resize is right side, tabs extend&#x2F;open to right and usually closed LIFO. I find I travel less distance across windows&#x2F;Ubuntu&#x2F;macos in general.<p>And yes I hate the Mac&#x27;s left placement of window controlsnehich breaks my flow.

While having the taskbar on the left works fine on single-monitor setups, I dislike it on multi-monitor setups where the taskbar is shown on all the screens. Typically I like having the taskbar mirrored on all my screens so I can access it easily wherever my mouse is. In this case the left taskbar ends up obstructing any windows that span multiple monitors.

I’ve wanted the LG DualUp for a long time.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lg.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;monitors&#x2F;lg-28mq780-b" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lg.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;monitors&#x2F;lg-28mq780-b</a><p>This is due primarily to hating having tons of horizontal and very little vertical… which just seems stupid for the content we all deal with most of the time. If you’re the average person, you cruise Facebook half the day and use Google Docs for the other half (I’m exaggerating, but you get it) and in either of those your vertical space is at a premium. The browser’s chrome eats space, then you have the site’s controls eating space, and then you have the OS’s crap eating space, and you get the remainder for your actual content. Infuriating.

Both horizontal and vertical spaces are important for me. I need a large horizontal space to work in CAD, and a large vertical space to read datasheets. Having a second vertical monitor is indispensable for productivity.

I like what I have with Sway: No visible docks or bars unless I press the Super key, which causes a bottom panel to appear.<p>This design means maximum screen real estate for apps, with dock features available when I need them.

I&#x27;ve lately been a fan of Haiku&#x27;s (and BeOS&#x27;) default approach of putting taskbar functionality in the (top-right) corner, without taking up the entire edge (unless you&#x27;ve somehow got enough distinct windowed programs running to necessitate that. Achieves most of the same paradigm; the only thing missing is the window control button placement, but the tabbed windows are a worthwhile tradeoff.<p>I still prefer tiled windows (particularly herbstluftwm and PaperWM), but as far as floating window setups go it feels about as well-designed as it gets.

I completely agree that the horizontal junk across the top of GNOME is a horrible waste of space. But...<p>&gt; For a long time, the looks of macOS, and therefore the looks of elementary OS fascinated me. I found the dock elegant and the black bar at the top a needed bad.<p>&gt; At least until I realized how wasteful this desktop paradigm is, as most of our screens, including TVs, laptop screens, and computer displays are horizontally wide.<p>Surely he knows that the dock can trivially be set to be vertical, right? Right?<p>&gt; The top panel in macOS makes at least some sense due to their well-implemented global menu system. But what about applications that do not have menus? In that case, the top panel is just in the way of content.<p>Almost all applications of consequence have menus in MacOS. I guess a few &#x2F;Applications&#x2F;Utilities programs maybe...

The MX Linux example shown (XFCE-based) has at least a couple of further panel (dock) options that may be desirable: automatic hiding, moving to the right side, background transparency, etc. and the MX Tweaks app has a tool for backing up the panel preferences separately from any other backups if you are a panel tinkerer who has an &#x27;&#x27;oh no&#x27;&#x27; moment.

It baffles me that in thirty years Microsoft has not once thought &quot;hey, what if the Windows desktop adjusted itself to what the user was doing?&quot; I mean, something as simple as scaling the height of the taskbar with the number of open windows seems blindingly obvious to me.

I set the Mac OS dock to auto-hide and it frees up, like, an inch of space. Blows me away when I see people with the default-sized dock always open. Any real reason for this?

related to TFA but different: does anyone know how to xrandr to arrange 3 screens into this arrangement:<p><pre><code> S C R E E N T H R E E screen one screen two </code></pre> so that moving the mouse vertically from screen 1 or 2 enters screen 3?<p>That is:<p><pre><code> screen one LEFT-OF screen two screen one BELOW screen three screen two BELOW screen three </code></pre> Last time I tried this, it did not work (I assume because xrandr makes assumptions about physical monitor size)

Always found it strange that macOS didn&#x27;t follow their OG NeXTstep design for the dock and menus.