Overview of the Desks Overview

The Desks Overview

The Desks Overview is a small map of all your desks. A desk is a separate screenful of windows, sometimes called a virtual desktop or a workspace. Each desk is drawn as a cell, and the windows on it appear as little rectangles inside the cell, so you can see at a glance what is where.

Blueprint's Desks Overview program is called cydesks.

In This Book

What Belongs to the Window Manager

The overview is a window onto the desks the window manager keeps. It does not hold the desks itself. That division matters when you are wondering where a setting lives.

the window manager    how many desks, and their names
cydesks               how the map is drawn

Ask the overview for a new desk and it asks the window manager, which makes the desk and tells everyone. Change the scale and only the map changes. See Setting Preferences, where the two kinds sit on the same page but go to different places.

Because the desks belong to the window manager, everything you do here shows up immediately in every other program that watches desks, and the desk you switch to with a keyboard shortcut is the desk the map marks as current.

Ten Desks, Three Shown

Blueprint starts with ten desks. Drawing all ten in a small window is a smear, so the map shows a sliding window of three by default: the current desk and its nearest neighbours. Scroll arrows at the ends move the window along. Set it to zero on the preferences page to show every desk at once, which is what the original tool always did. See Setting Preferences.