Earlier this week Brent Simmons asked how people manage lots of windows (close them, minimize them, hide them, or Exposé them). Like Brent, I'm mostly a hider. Those years that I spent on System 7 and 8 are still buried back in my brain stem somewhere. I don't close windows because I like to have the applications open and not wait for them to start (although I do sometimes have to wait for them to page in). Minimizing just doesn't work for me -- I don't like the animation -- when I want the window out of the way, I want it out of the way fast. I do use the command-tab application switcher very heavily and find that this takes care of many of my window/application management needs.

I was using virtual desktops, but earlier this month I decided to turn off Codetek Virtual Desktop and see what life would be like without virtual desktops. Surprisingly, I don't feel any less organized without the virtual desktops. That's odd, because I never would have shelled out the money for Codetek (which is a perfectly good virtual desktop solution. Along the way to no virtual desktops, I tried Desktop Manger and Virtue, which I liked less than the CodeTek product.). So for now, it looks like virtual desktops are out of my repertoire of window management tricks.

I'd like to use Exposé more, but I find that all the ways of triggering it are awkward. My touch-typing doesn't extend to the function keys, so I never hit the right one. I've tried the mouse corners, but I don't like having to move the mouse all over my (large) desktop to hit a corner (Fitt's law notwithstanding). What I'd really like is to hold a modifier key and hit one of the extra buttons on my Intellimouse Explorer and trigger Exposé that way. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a utility that will let me assign actions to modified mouse clicks. Perhaps a future version of USB Overdrive will do the trick -- the author seems to have found time for it again.

I also want to train my muscle memory to use Quicksilver to switch apps more often, but a major problem that I'm having with QuickSilver is that that it ends up getting swapped out, and so there's a long delay while waiting for the Quicksilver dialog to pop up.