Last couple of years, I’ve spent working on a system for identification of variant peptides. As it was rather complex system, at one point I’ve started to realize that a lot of time is lost while navigating between workspaces and searching for the right one. This was mainly because there was not enough workspaces to establish logic of navigation. Once established, however, the navigation becomes very natural and efficient. I’ve realized this when working on web interface for the system and 3 x 3 desktop was really not enough. Mild upgrade to 4 x 4 significantly improved the situation and it was just a matter of one day to realize, that more would be needed and beneficial. I’ve lately start to utilize it for almost any kind of work. I suggest that you should try that as well, because it is a real time saver.
For instance, depicted here is a system of workspaces for writing a paper. On the left, there are individual figures in main text and supplementary, all ordered from first to last figure. The whole area is centered around the main paper, being in the very middle. Around the main area, there are, e.g., webpages to various dictionaries, diary of work, Mendeley for organization of literature and similar.
In one workspace, there’s actually a connection to computer cluster with another 7×5 workspaces, so in some sense this is not all. Further, to make more practical use of it, I’ve had to make a system which is capable of running applications in particular structure at workspaces, such that it becomes more easy to remember everything. But you might be as well fine with hibernation of computer.
As of now, I have a paper workspace, patent workspace and software system workspace. I haven’t made this application for restoration of workspaces into proper form for publication due time constraints yet. If there was interest, let me know. Another thing to consider is using emacs as window manager, which could be used even for different topology of navigation. However, this works rather well at present.
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