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Re:Hackers' screen shots by abstractbill on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @12:54PM (#74710)
Yup, it's just noise to me. I prefer to have the other buffers loaded in Emacs, but not displayed on the screen where I'll be distracted by them.

My perfect dev environment would go as far as blanking out everything in my peripheral vision too - maybe a set of VR goggles that only displays an Emacs window, dead center ;-)

Re:Hackers' screen shots by vegashacker on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @01:23PM (#74722)
I do the single plain window of emacs thing too (though I use Terminal, not the built-for-mac Emacs GUI, and I only go 90 chars wide on my window). I usually run three UNIX shell buffers inside of emacs, in addition to all the source code buffers. I never go to the mouse while in Emacs (because it doesn't do anything), which helps me move quickly.

<snobbery>I get a bit frustrated when I need to look over someone's shoulder while s/he is doing some programming related task. So many people move very slowly thru their environments. I want to show them the way...</snobbery>

I wasted about 2 hours of my life once trying to trick out my Mac to be that "one Emacs window and nothing else" setup that you're talking about. I never really found anything that worked, though.

Re:Hackers' screen shots by damien on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @07:12PM (#74864)
This may seem like an obvious point, but have you tried Linux (or another Free OS) with a tiling window manager? OS X does give you a nice prepackaged experienced, but if you love to tinker and have complete control to customize anything, Linux is ideal. And you can always dual boot, if you just want to try it out part time. =)
Re:Hackers' screen shots by vegashacker on Thursday November 01, 2007 @01:45AM (#74965)
The thing is, when I'm doing anything but programming (web surfing, watching a DVD, playing music, etc.) I want the smooth, easy-to-use, pleasant-looking experience that I get on a Mac. I periodically try Unix window managers to see how they're doing, but they honestly always seem pretty clunky to me.

But let's say for a minute that I did go the Unix window manager route. What would you recommend if I wanted to have one "mode" where basically everything is stripped away (no menu bar, no windows, nothing -- just a shell), and another mode which was your standard GUI? It would have to be fast to switch between the two.

Re:Hackers' screen shots by earthboundkid on Thursday November 01, 2007 @03:38AM (#74982)
Install X11 on your Mac and set it to run in fullscreen mode. Then install xemacs or whatever and you're set. When you're in X11, fullscreen programming. When you Cmd-tab away, OS X goodness.
Re:Hackers' screen shots by pc on Thursday November 01, 2007 @07:34AM (#75023)
If you want a tiling WM, ratpoison runs just fine under X11.app on the Mac -- and you can have it replace the standard Quartz WM via .xinitrc