Current Workflows

OK, rule number one (don't use "of thumb"), avoid trying to jump people away from the meat-and-potatoes of a blog post before they even start reading. AKA the link in the summary field, did you even click it? Why not?

Anyway, I hack at my workflows almost constantly. If it isn't reading, or programming, you can bet that I am looking to do something way better than yesterday. Since this post will end up being a list (hey, they are super easy to write), most of the workflow will be center around gui applications and not my overall crack-addiction to a CLI. Without, further ado, be prepared for negative-mediocrity!

  1. Yes, I run all of my big ticket applications in Lion and Mountain Lion's full screen mode. These are generally Chrome Canary, Iterm2, and OmniFocus...sometimes Rdio. This also means that I don't use a double monitor setup. I find them distracting and overall a UX clusterfuck.
  2. I am an Xmonad freak and wish there was something more like it available for the OS X. To get around this I use a launcher named Alfred. Alfred has an extension named layouts to control your windows and I assign cmd + option + # to apps I want to switch to quickly. This means that if I want to quickly navigate to Chrome, I can hit cmd + option + 2 instead of command-tabing there or using the mouse.
  3. Vim (NOT FUCKING MACVIM) + Tmux for combo awesome-sauce. This allows 1 iTerm2 window to stay open in full screen (with only two "iTerm" style tabs: tmux + bitlbee/irc server for chatting) and act as many different terminals through the power inherent in Tmux. In addition, some people seem to have a-beef with Tmux's copy and paste mode...I don't.
  4. Houdini is a free app that will hide away inactive items when a certain time limit is hit. The idea being that you have one constant, clean workspace. You cmd+tab(I use tab+q because those two items are generally close) to an app that isn't important enough to be full screen (thereby taking up a workspace) but, something you want to use later. This keeps the one "open" workspace free and clear of open/front-facing/distracting apps.

All of this is a little much to take in so if you have any questions hit me up on the Twitters. Overall though, it works fairly well, the only thing that I wish for was a smart window tiling manager, ala Xmonad. Tyler seems like a good option for this; however, it doesn't seem to function on Mountain Lion and it is long-in-the-tooth when it comes to a substantial upgrade...We shall see.

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