beryl: usability (ii)

howto enhance your workflow with beryl

Another quick beryl usability tip. I work at a desk all day, with a computer screen that sits in the corner. A lot of the time, I'm using the computer for email, research, drafting documents. But other times, I'm on the phone, or reading, or just staring out the window hoping for inspiration of some sort. During these times, I still need to keep an eye on my computer screen and the things that are going on on it - checking for incoming emails, irc conversations, software compilations and other bits and pieces (including watching the odd video).

Problem is, I spread my applications across all 4 desktops, so that things feel uncluttered when I'm working on an application. However, when you want to keep an eye on several applications at a time, it's impossible - except, if you have beryl. What I do is set one of the corners of my desktop to activate the scale plugin to show all windows from all desktops (see here for a more detailed explanation). I also make sure that it shows minimised windows.

Then, when I'm off doing something else, I flick the mouse to a corner of the screen, and hey presto, I've got all of my windows showing. I can then keep an eye on things, and when something requires my attention, I just click on that window. Even better, if I need to quickly type something in a window, I can - without leaving scale. You can do this by checking the Allow keyboard input under the Behaviour tab on the scale plugin.

More improvements to workflow with beryl.

You can discuss this howto on the forums.