Creating, Renaming, and Removing Desks

The number of desks is not fixed. Blueprint starts with ten. The Desk menu adds, renames and removes them, and the preferences panel does the same things from a list. Either way the request goes to the window manager, which owns the desks.

Selecting a Desk

The Desk menu's items act on the SELECTED desk, which is not always the current one. Click a cell to select it; clicking also switches to it, so in practice the selected desk is the one you are on unless you have just used the scroll arrows.

Adding a Desk

Choose New Desk from the Desk menu, or press Ctrl+N. A desk is appended, and the map redraws to include it.

There is an upper limit. When you have reached it, the overview says "There is no room for another desk." rather than silently doing nothing.

Naming a Desk

Choose Rename Selected from the Desk menu, or press Ctrl+R. A small dialog appears, titled with the desk you are renaming, for example "Rename Desk 4". It has one field, labelled "Desk name:".

The current name is filled in and completely selected, with the caret at the end. Typing replaces it. That is deliberate: renaming almost always means replacing, and a field that quietly prepends gives you a desk called "LothlorienDesktop 4".

Press OK to commit or Cancel to leave the name alone.

The name belongs to the window manager, so it shows everywhere a desk is labelled, including the Toolchest title when that desk is current.

Going to a Desk

Choose Goto Selected from the Desk menu, or press Ctrl+O, to switch to the selected desk. Clicking the cell does the same thing; this exists so that the whole verb set is reachable from the keyboard.

Removing a Desk

Choose Delete Selected from the Desk menu. It has no keyboard shortcut on purpose: removing a desk is destructive and should not have a one-chord path.

A confirmation dialog names the desk before anything happens. Removing a desk that still has windows moves those windows rather than losing them.

Copy Selected

The Desk menu also lists Copy Selected. It is present in the menu but it is not live yet and appears greyed. See The Menus.

From the Preferences Panel

The Desk Names page of the preferences panel does all of this from a list: it shows every desk with its name, and has Modify, Add and Drop buttons. That page is often quicker when you are renaming several desks at once. See Setting Preferences.

See Size, Orientation, and Labels for how names and windows are drawn in the map.