ion3

I spent some time this evening switching from ion2 to ion3. It was painful, because there's no coherent documentation for ion3 yet, and even incoherent docs are somewhat scarce, since there's no longer a wiki. I found myself reading the source more than once. Still, it was worth it. I eventually recreated my old ion2 config, and then played some with the new features.

I've never been very enthused with ion3's new scratchpad, or the other stuff for overlapping windows, because unlike some ion users, I don't have a nagging hankering for overlapping windows. Likewise the statusbar thing is just reinventing the wheel, and the dock is better (now usable for me), but boring.

So I'm very happy to see unique new concepts in window manager design are still popping up in ion3 despite those additions. I'm also starting to see why some recent ion innovations have been described with videos, it's kinda hard to describe a floating split or how the PaneWS works in words.

The floating split is especially useful; now my main desktop can reconfigure itself dynamically in some handy ways as I move from frame to frame. I've got a log monitor barely visible down in a bottom corner of the screen, just a few lines there so that I might notice some strange message out of the corner of my eye (see calm computing). Move the mouse down to the bottom of the screen (or otherwise move focus down; basically, "look down"), and it expands to let me see many more lines of logs. No clicking, window dragging, or any of that nonsense needed either, it just there when I need it, and then it goes away.

A similar trick lets me switch between my large main web browser / coding / email frame and a collection of small frames holding irc sessions and stuff that is hidden at the bottom of it. Works much better than the old nested workspace approach.