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by bcrosby95 1205 days ago
I use shortcuts extensively too. And sometimes work exclusively on my laptop.

That said, it's helpful to be able to use my project while seeing all the logs involved. And that gets extremely claustrophobic on a laptop. Especially if you have an application that is heavy on both the client and server side - chrome, chrome devtools, re-frame-10x sidebar debugger, server side logs/debugger.

It gets even worse when I'm working on one project, which is a client/server game using Unity.

> Mostly I find it annoying because I forget where I put my applications if I have two monitors.

Your applications should always be in the same place. You can still use keyboard shortcuts too.

Beyond that, because when I first got a 30" monitor it was so much real estate and it took so long to move my mouse between windows, I wrote a little program that let me set and restore mouse positions with global hotkeys. It will also bring whichever window is under the mouse position to the front.

So I can see all logs at once as I'm interacting with the project. Including the debugger. Everything always goes in the same spot. And if I want to interact with one of those windows, I can use a hotkey which will instantly set my mouse cursor to a known good position within that window, which enables me to interact with even a GUI in a reproducible fashion rather than having to slow boat my cursor over to it.

1 comments

> Beyond that, because when I first got a 30" monitor it was so much real estate and it took so long to move my mouse between windows, I wrote a little program that let me set and restore mouse positions with global hotkeys. It will also bring whichever window is under the mouse position to the front.

On Windows, the focus-follows-mouse feature does both these things. Along with raising and focusing whatever you mouseover, it also moves the mouse to any window you alt-tab too. Sadly, it's been tuned weirdly in new versions of windows so it isn't very useful now.

That's cool, I didn't know such a thing existed - when I ran into the problem I was at a loss on what to search for to make the large monitor more usable.

Too bad it's weird now.

I don't use windows anymore, but when I first did this it was for windows, and it was only something like 100 lines of C to accomplish including all the standard windows boilerplate.