How to get greater resolution

[Jeff Dooley]

> Why use a virtual screen size that's larger than your highest resolution?
>
> Rick Knight

I've done this in the past, but not with KDE.

In days long ago, Afterstep was a pretty cool window manager--
actually it still is, but I find application integration in the GUI
environment is key-- and nowadays, that pretty much means either GNOME
or KDE.

But if you remember afterstep, it basically had a floating wharf (like
the dock in OS X, or a kde panel sized at about 25%, vertically from
the upper right corner of the screen) and sometimes a taskbar running
across the top. But, essentially, the UI was very minimal and 90% of
your screen was open space.

Now, personally, I find virtual desktops to be a pain. If you have to
skip from desktop to desktop, how is that different from having
different windows in front of or behind other windows-- to me, virtual
desktops don't add much benefit or reduce much clutter since you still
have a window (or a desktop) obstructing your view of other open apps
that you may be trying to multitask with. However, a HUGE desktop was
actually pretty nice.

My method of operation was to create a desktop that was 3X wider and
2X taller than my actual screen and then start filling it with term
windows and browser windows. Then I could simply pan over to see the
windows I wanted to. You could effectively group windows that were
relevant, and if a window group wouldn't quite fit on one screen, it
might fit on 1.5 screens and I could simply pan over a half-screen,
still look at part of what I was looking at before, but also now work
on this other new thing. Basically, this panning-style of user
interface is pretty useful to me. Unfortunately, I've never seen a
fully clean implementation of this. Afterstep would jump a
predetermined number of pixels when you touched the edge of the
screen, and then you would have to physically move your mouse again to
have it pan a little further. My idea would be more like a video game
map where once you touch the edge, it automatically starts panning
over until you pull your mouse off the edge.

Anyway, it is probably an interface that is hard to describe its
benefits in words without actually seeing and trying it yourself, but
I liked it a lot myself.

-jeff
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