I've finally gotten around to creating a screenshot of my desktop, now available here (500Kb PNG). My desktop is two 1280x1024 LCD panels in side by side mode, so this is a 2560x1024 picture. (You can probably easily spot the dividing line between the two panels.)

This screenshot shows a number of things that I've talked about, such as pyhosts and xrun; also visible is an xterm showing off the very handy ziconbeep feature (look at the top left). The overall appearance is fairly representative of what my desktop normally looks like, including the clutter of Firefox windows that drove me to lazy hacks.

One of my peculiarities is immediately visible; I like to have things present on both physical screens, so you can see duplicates of things like the fvwm pager. In practice I rarely use the ones on the left screen, but I like having them there for some reason. Another peculiarity is that I mostly work on the right screen (the left side of the right screen is my primary working area) and use the left screen mostly for overflow and secondary windows.

(Also, my 'working area' is the space below the xruns; in practice there is an invisible dividing line around there that I rarely cross with active windows. You can see this in the top height of the browser and emacs windows.)

The window manager is fvwm 2.5.x (specifically a relatively current build from CVS). The thing at the top left is an FvwmIconMan instance that swallows all of my terminal windows (primarily xterms, but I also use gnome-terminal and 9term). Terminal windows are my most common sort of windows and FvwmIconMan gives me a very compact way of keeping track of all of them.

The thing at the right just below the pager is stalonetray, which I use to give all of the Gnome applets and widgets somewhere to hang out (since I don't actually use Gnome). Most of the time all it contains is the Gnome volume control.

(If this leaves you with further questions, leave a comment.)

Sidebar: a bonus from 1996

I have pulled out of the archives my desktop screenshot from 1996 that is referenced on my old desktop writeup on my old site; you can find it here. Although some of the details have changed, I think it's recognizable as a version of what I have now. I've changed things since 1996 but by and large not my tastes.

Looking back at the 1996 screenshot, some things now make me wince. For example, I can't believe that I spent so long wasting the valuable top left corner on nothing more than load monitors. (Of course today I am similarly wasting the top right corner on, well, nothing.)