== Two different usage patterns 

Recently, for my version of recently, a shell history meme has been
going around [[various http://plasmasturm.org/log/497/]] [[places
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/04/15/History-Meme]].
Thinking about the meme and what it would look like for me has led
me to thinking about two different usage patterns in Unix graphical
environments; I will call these persistent and disposable.

People who follow the persistent pattern like long-lived, multi-purpose
contexts; for example, they are inclined to leave a terminal window or a
shell session active for a long time, and over its lifetime such a shell
will wind up doing many unrelated things. By contrast, people who follow
the disposable pattern have short-lived, single-purpose contexts; for
example, if they need to do a new thing they open a new terminal window,
do the thing, and then close it.

This difference matters because it changes what you care about. If
you're a persistent pattern person you probably don't care too much
about how long a new shell session takes to start, because you do it
rarely, but you probably do care a lot about good shell history because
you have a lot of it. If you're a disposable pattern person it's the
other way around; you care a lot about fast program startup, but not so
much about history.

Most of the time I am strongly a disposable pattern person (as I put
it [[once MyFirefoxRemoteControl]], 'one window, one purpose'), to the
point where I not infrequently close one window and open up an identical
new one just because the new one will be used for a different job. This
does mean that I don't really have anything to say on the shell history
meme, because I throw away my shell histories when I exit my shells.

(A one window, one purpose approach doesn't necessarily mean no
persistent programs; [[sometimes MyFirefoxRemoteControl]] the best way
to get fast disposable windows is to keep a program around. I have a
fair amount of infrastructure designed to make getting new windows fast
and easy, so that I'm encouraged to throw away old ones.)