Microsoft is considering bringing virtual desktops to Windows Threshold. The feature, which is already on other platforms like Ubuntu and OS X is currently being tested and is said to have similar functionality to that of Ubuntu. You can activate the desktops with a button on the taskbar (subject to change) and there are keyboard shortcuts that let you jump between active desktops.
Of course, this should have been done eons ago, but the fact they’re considering it now is great news. Let’s hope it’s true.
They need to work on what they do best, Video games and Microsoft office. The only thing that will save windows at this poiint is a free porn subscription with each windows license.
LOL
I never tried Microsoft games but from what I remember of the my Windows days a decade ago, Microsoft Office was a wonderful product that was much better refined and polished than Windows.
I would definitely buy it if (yes, I know it is impossible) there was Microsoft office for Linux.
Edited 2014-08-05 22:19 UTC
Save windows? From what? They are still untouchable on the desktop. The only thing that could make a dent in that is maybe apple selling OSX for generic PCs (yeah, like that will happen).
Why not? Apple did it last time Jobs left them, and this time he is not coming back.
Or is he….?!?!? 🙂
Jobs will be back as soon as Zombie Reagan joins the board of directors.
Jobs is exactly the type of person who would have had his intelligence uploaded in to some kind of experimental neuronet if he could have. Maybe he lives on as part of the OS X botnet!! lol!! 😉
Would that be considered bloatware?
[face_thinking]
In a sense, they have done it eons ago.
IIRC, NT4 supported virtual desktops (Maybe it was Win95?). (edit: nope. NT and Win95 have APIs to support it, but they differ)
There was also a nice XP Powertoy that allowed it.
It’d be cool if it did come back. More than that, though, is I want a GUI for enabling X-Mouse. I hate having to dig into the registry every time I want to enable it.
EDIT: Also, there’s this:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/cc817881
Edited 2014-08-05 22:18 UTC
I have a better question…why? Why would you want this and why would Joe Public care? I bet if Canonical ran a background program that reported back how many use multiple desktops that number would be in high single digits AT BEST, just as I doubt there was even 8% of the WinXP users that ever bothered with the Powertoy that enabled multiples.
When you have application grouping and alt-tab other than showing off I really am not seeing a point. Its like Flip3D and the Linux desktop Cube, something the majority will play with once or twice and then never come back to. If you use it? I’m glad you find it usable but I bet you are in a teeny minority and just like Flip3D and the cube I have no doubt I’ll never meet anybody in person that uses it, its really not needed on Windows other than a checkbox to check.
When I’ve got KDE on my desktop, I use it extensively, taking the whole “Activities” metaphor to heart (Though, I don’t use activities, and just regular virtual desktops).
It helps to keep track of multiple unrelated workflows – graphics stuff on one, development on another, arguing with people on OSNews on a third. (Ok. I’m kidding about that one)
Sadly, I’m not running KDE right now (Switched back to Windows in March after a year and a half), so the thought of having a good virtual desktop solution for Windows is exciting.
Of course, this is just my workflow, how I use it. Everybody that uses virtual desktops uses it in their own style.
Also, not every feature needs to be used by the majority of people. If only 5% of people use it, but it is the most important feature, then it’s fairly important that it gets implemented well. NT has always had facilities underneath the hood for using multiple desktops, but nothing implementing it terribly well. Hopefully this changes.
aaaand you can do the same thing with activity grouping on a single desktop and when the average Joe is a single tasker? Again like the cube it will be used by MAYBE 5% if that.
This reminds me of metro frankly, as while you had a small handful that thought the Metro UI was the best thing since sliced bread all anybody else wanted to know was how to turn the thing off and I really wouldn’t be surprised if that is the case with VDs. Again we have had free tools to enable this on Windows since XP, yet the number of folks that actually downloaded and used the tools wouldn’t even reach 5% of the public.
http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/ ?
Oddly enough, Microsoft did file a patent for virtual desktops.
http://1.usa.gov/1mk7TZT
OMG, that patent was filled in 2003, compiz was released with this pluggin way later.
It is a mistery.
What! The Amiga 1000 had virtual desktops in 1984 and I believe previews of them came with iconifier in 1985.
If I am wrong please correct me.
Also BeOS had virtual screens in the 1990s.
How can they file a valid patent?
Most UNIX GUI implementations had virtual desktops earlier than 2003. If I remember correctly, Sun OpenLook had them, CDE had them, NeXT had them, SGI had them. Even I am using them probably since the mid-1990’s (Linux and BSD with FVWM and WindowMaker). So I can actually follow your question and would also like to ask:
Probably a case for “Two lawyers, three opinions”. 🙂
From the summary, I got the impression that patent was actually focused on the “zoom out”-style desktop switcher.
According to Wikipedia (with sources needed perhaps on the matter) in general home usage the Amiga was indeed first.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_desktop#Implementation
Hm, it wasn’t the same kind of virtual desktops that we’re used to, it was more a sliding secondary screen/application. Though it was hardware-accelerated! :p (but it came out in 1985)
Litestep for windows featured virtual desktops ever since Win95 versions.
Ah, LiteStep and DarkStep and derivatives. Such wonderful memories. Made working on 800×600 monitors so much nicer (smaller boarders and more keyboard shortcuts). It’s too bad the official Windows shell didn’t take design cues from them.
I love how a lot of people consider Ubuntu to be Linux to the exclusion of the 750+ other (older or better) distributions. It just goes to show how ill-informed this author really is about the tech industry; clearly he’s never stepped into the world without walls. Virtual desktops are not some feature that Ubuntu created or featured. They’re a native feature of UNIX/Linux and have been since the very beginning. Which is why Mac-OSX has them; it’s built on UNIX. Every desktop environment supports virtual desktops.
The author is not obligated to list all the Linux distros in existence, and Ubuntu is the more popular, so if your pet Linux distro is not mentioned then, is not a big deal.
No, no don’t misunderstand. I wasn’t looking for my pet distro, rather I was pointing out a common misconception in tech when someone not of the FOSS world essentially equates Ubuntu as THE Linux which is strange because Ubuntu uses it’s own home grown desktop (Unity). And for the record, Ubuntu is no longer the most popular Linux distro; that honor now belongs to Linux Mint. That’s all. Don’t get your panties in a wad over it. I certainly didn’t.
The reason for this is that Ubuntu is by far and away the most used DESKTOP distro. It’s also the only distro the vast majority of people have heard of.
What this means is that you can use Ubuntu when you mean Linux when writing an article aimed at the general public rather then one aimed at geeks.
Remember, journalists in the US are trained to write at a 6th grade level, it’s just one of many things that are very wrong with my country these days…
Sources for that claim? Distrowatch doesn’t count, it’s just a number of hits on one fairly small webpage popular among enthusiasts, even easy to manipulate.
Meanwhile, Ubuntu absolutely dwarfs other Linux distros in visits on Wikimedia servers.
Edited 2014-08-07 03:41 UTC
Actually, they’re a feature of X11… which OSX chose to replace with Quartz because it would be too much work to fix various flaws in it.
OSX lacked virtual desktops for quite a while before Apple finally admitted that, like the right mouse button, their utility outweighed the potential for confusion.
It seems that Ubuntu bashing is has always been the fashion of some people in the tech world.
Really? In Unix since the beginning? Really?
Finally.
There is no better way to hide pr0n surfing than using virtual desktops.
i never looked back to virtual desktops since i upgraded to a dual-monitor setup a decade ago
but i guess it would be nice on my laptop…
I find having two virtual desktops a cleaner, easier-to-use, more versatile alternative to “show desktop”.
(I use fullscreen windows so heavily on my dual-head desktop that, if you can see the desktop on workspace #1, something’s wrong and, next PC I get, I’ll probably upgrade to triple-head)
i never use “show desktop”
hitting the windows-key and typing 3 characters is way faster
First, I’m strongly averse to anything which makes modifier keys do something when not chorded.
Second, my desktop has a mix of atypical stuff on it. For example, like a Conky system monitor I often glance at to check CPU, memory, and disk usage.
Plus, note that I said “more versatile”. For certain tasks, nothing beats being able to flip back and forth through four different 2560×1024 desktops.
Even dual 4K monitors wouldn’t match that much usable space. (dual 4K monitors would give me 3.69 times as much usable space while, with virtual desktops, I’ve got 4)
…plus, I don’t have room for dual 4K monitors and my neck would get tired.
I have a dual monitor setup but I use it anyhow. I have one virtual esktop for development and oen for the rest (email + browser + office)
I have a dual-monitor setup at work (27″ 1920×1080), and I still have 2 virtual desktops setup. I rarely use the second one, but when I do, it’s a god-send.
The primary VD usually has Chrome, Terminator, LibreOffice, Dolphin, and various other apps open (usually locked to half of a monitor).
I occasionally switch to the other VD when I need to run cluster-ssh to a group of server. That way, I have 10-30 xterm windows open and managed as a group, and it’s a quick flip back and forth to my daily workings.
Much cleaner than trying to manage 50-odd windows on a single desktop.
Obviously, it all depends on how your work flows.
Terminator? :> (searching for that one might return a lot of random results
) Some kind of terminal emulator?
Single-window terminal emulator that let’s you split the view horizontally and/or vertically as many times as needed. And supports tabs. And grouping views. And sending commands to all views in a group.
I was a hardcore user of konsole until my co-worker showed me Terminator.
It must just be me that hates that stuff, I really don’t see why android does it with their home screen. I always dissable or remove that from the bars. It was a nice effect with compiz, but other than that. Most programs support tabs, I know gnome terminal and Nautilus used to. Then your web browsers, irc clientsm yada yada yada……
Your not alone, lots of people avoid virtual desktops…
Thing is though, it is an extremely easy feature to implement in a way that is completely invisible to people that don’t want to use it.
Android oddly (imo) chooses to expose it quite prominently right from the get go, but there is no need to do that. Most UIs only dedicate a very small widget to it visually, some don’t even do that and push it into menus or even nothing but keyboard shortcuts. It can easily be a zero-overhead feature as far as UX goes.
I don’t think microsoft really understand that a lot of people have multiple monitors. Or are multiple monitors a minority in userland?
I’ve found that virtual desktops are a bit pointless these days. I have stopped using them completely in GNOME and XFCE for at least the last 2/3 years.
I just don’t see how this will be used by any long term windows user. Windows needs alt+drag support and better window focus before it needs virtual desktops.
They are not pointless, it is just as you say multiple monitors has reduced the need for virtual screens.
95% of the use of virtual screens can be done as good and at times better with multiple monitor.
But even with multiple screens if you are doing a lot of work your screens still can become so cluttered that a clean and empty virtual screen becomes useful near the end of a work day.
Until about 6 months ago when I got a 4K HDTV I would feel constricted with in Windows compared using virtual screen in HaikuOS. More is better.
Best is having both multiple monitors and virtual screens at the same time.
Well, Even Windows 8 brought improvements to multi-monitor support. 8.1 after that, too.
What sort of focus improvement does Windows need?
“Focus follows mouse” would be wonderful to have. It always drives me batty when I have to use a Windows station, and I actually have to click the mouse to make it focus a window.
“Highlight to copy” to a separate clipboard is also very nice to use, once you get used to it. As is “middle-click paste”. And those missing features drive me batty when I have to use Windows.
Being able to move the mouse over a window while aiming for a text box and have it come into focus before the mouse gets there is wonderful. Especially if it doesn’t bring the window into the front of all the other windows, and you can just start to type, hit enter, move the mouse slightly, and carry on with what you were doing previously. All without the windows moving in z-order.
Copy/paste between windows without ever having to remove the hand from the mouse or moving windows is also wonderfully useful.
I never liked X-Mouse-style focus settings or copy/paste until I got a dual-monitor setup and stopped maximising all my windows. Now I can’t live without them and try to avoid Windows as much as possible because of it.
Windows has decent focus follows mouse, though sadly it’s not exposed via a UI.
XP’s TweakUI tool provides a UI, but you can also edit the registry by hand.
Under [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop]
Find “UserPreferencesMask”, and edit the hex values for it.
Add 40h to the first value if you want autoraise, and 01h to enable focus follows mouse.
Next, create the decimal value “ActiveWndTrkTimeout” and set the value to what you want the delay to be, in milliseconds.
Note that there is a value called “ActiveWndTrackTimeout” already. I’m not sure why this exists, but it doesn’t do anything as far as I know.
I always disliked the auto-copy when highlighting thing, especially since it’s somewhat inconsistent (like everything else) in X.
I use them quite extensively, including with multimonitor setups. KDE offers activities as well, which are kind of orthogonal to virtual desktops, but I prefer the former most of the time.
Since the days of NT I use virtual desktops and even now with two monitors.
With this I have one development desktop, one for support, one for email, one for web browsing. And I do not want to miss this feature, to quickly switch from one set of windows to the other.
Yes, a small minority. Luckily, avgalen linked below http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/05/21/enhancing-windows-8-f… where there is a table showing that 85% of desktops and 96% of laptops have one monitor (also, “It is important to note that this particular opt-in data set is enthusiast-leaning so represents the high end of usage”)
Plus, laptops are a majority of sold PCs for a good few years.
Good for them at least that they are waking up to competition.
I remember in Windows 2000 they “invented”… symlinks? I was laughing so hard…
And the ability to “mount” partition in a folder!
(Hell, what an invention!)
“platforms like Ubuntu”
So, Ubuntu is a platform now.
Anyway, virtual desktops? It seems MS needed to wait to almost the 30th birthday of virtual desktops to actually get to the point where someone came to ask: hey, maybe this thing actually might be useful, right? Good job guys, really, I wonder what revolutionary new feature you’ll provide in the next release.
Why is everyone complaining about browsers and mediaplayers and anti-virus integrating into the OS (although they all can be uninstalled or turned off now) but not about this? The people that want to use Virtual Desktops have been doing so with external tools (free or paid) and now that niche-market will become even more niche.
Recently I’ve read some MS guy say they didn’t implement virtual desktops so as not to confuse users. Maybe they think Windows 8 has prepared their users for the confusion which virtual desktops can surely create 😉
I’ve always found Windows quite lacking in the windows managing department, which is quite ironic, considering its name. One apparently cannot even have a small window always on top of another (at least without third party software – I haven’t found one properly integrated). At least it seems Firefox has implemented something by itself at some point and one can scroll in its inactive window 😉
Fortunately for me, there is KWin, which lets me do everything imaginable with windows and thus lets me actually do my work efficiently. I do use virtual desktops and tabbed windows when working, and generally take advantage of window managing features that Windows lacks.
Microsoft once posted some data about how their users used Windowing. I couldn’t quickly find it but it was something like “90% of all users use 1 or 2 windows at most”. Their (over)reaction was great for that 90%:
WinKey+Left, Align 1 window on the left
WinKey+Right, Align 1 window on the right
WinKey+Up, Maximise the window
Introduce Fullscreen Apps that have similar multi-windowing features that even influence each other
Now that they received so many complaints about the “dumbing down of the environment” and “not productive” adding Virtual Desktop seems like a great (over)reaction
There is something wrong with that stat.
If it was true then Windows ME would had been fine.
It should probably read as:
“90% of all users use 1 or 2 windows 90% of the time.”
Now the remaining 10% ??????
No, Windows ME would not have been fine for window management because it was difficult to align multiple windows next to each other. Also, In the Windows ME timeframe resolutions were generally much lower.
I think it comes from this research, or at least related data (this is for Windows 8, I am quite sure the research was about Windows 7): http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/05/21/enhancing-windows-8-f…
wow that’s so much easier than swiping left or right on a magic touchpad in os x …thanks microsoft!
I used Virtua Win http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/ for ages on Windows, until I got multiple monitors at work. Great, flexible implementation of virtual desktops… I should probably install it on my laptop.
I can only double this. Great tool.
I hope they go through with this feature! I take up all the desktop space on two monitors as it is, so having virtual desktops to spread out my windows would be a very nice feature.
Also, I’d like to see a way of extending the task bar across multiple monitors without the need of a third party app.
This is in Windows 8.
It is funny that when i was Matrox graphic cards fanboy i get used to that. It was available thru Matrox PowerDesk drivers, and was possible to do eons ago on Windows 3.11
Before Linux even exist 