[40yearoldman]

Minimal desktops are productivity boosters. On top of that ones that can be controlled by keyboard input are super important.

99% of the time you just want information. Text. The chrome does not matter. Yet modern desktops and web pages make humans hunt and pick through poorly designed interfaces to get the info we need.

I use EXWM. It’s a time saver. I have no desktop because I am either using the full screen for a single application or flip flopping between a few apps that share the entire screen. This means every pixel of the screen is used and not wasted on useless images of empty fields.

In top of that I am able to designate windows and frames for specific jobs or functions, always able to recall the last terminal or most relevance.

We fucked up with movable windows. They are inefficient complicated and bring little value over a simple list of activities to switch between.

[jwells89]

I believe this is kind of thing is highly subjective as well as dependent on hardware. Point in case fullscreening anything but an IDE or graphics editor on a 27"+ monitor drives me crazy because most things don't make good use of the extra space. Similarly I find tiled smaller windows irritating because they often size themselves incorrectly, ironically making for more manual window twiddling and micromanagement than I'd be doing with a boring old floating window manager.

[40yearoldman]

Tiling -- split left and right or up and down... This is the case within in Emacs.

Given I use a much larger screen I can assure you it works well.

[kaba0]

> just want information. Text

Text is a not an information-dense medium, and for many kind of data it simply sucks.

Also, please don’t just go around throwing productivity into sentences, it is just completely baseless and biased observation on your own part - if you better enjoy a new workflow, but it is actually slower, you might still feel more “productive”.

[abwizz]

> Text is a not an information-dense medium

true, but the api is very stable

[makapuf]

Not sure it isn't: try to convey this information within the same space graphically...

[anthk]

I used to use Emacs for everything, even Telega and SICP. But... elfeed and GNU's are damn slow compared to the opposite approach: Unix, sfeed, lynx -dump for inline HTML info, castget, mutt, msmtp, isync, slrn and amused/mpv. MuPDF and sxiv for media. That's it, plus some CLI gemini/gopher browser.

And, yes, I managed to bind slrnpull with GNU's avoiding a huge chunk of time. And, SLRN was much faster. On hackability, I don't care, awk/sed/sh it's my glue, and perl+CPAN for a big task.

In the end, it's being run on a batch basis with cron, so I have the ultimate Unix tools: let the tools do the hard work themselves with scripts, so you just ignore anything else and focus on your current task. Mails, news posts and RSS's are currently managed in the background, a single script will download and upload all the data.