(There may be other ways of doing this, but FWIW…) If you’ve ever wanted to reduce workspace clutter by merging two terminal instances, you can do this easily by creating a tabbed view within one of the instances (SHIFT+CTRL+T) and dragging the tab (or tabs) you wish to merge to the other instance. Simple eh?
Can’t confirm if this works in KDE, but I suspect it does 
FOSS to the rescue again. Earlier today I found myself using a pencil and paper to work out some IP address-CIDR prefix combinations required to make up an address range that I needed to add to Firestarter’s policy rules. I thought, “This is madness, there’s got to be something in the Ubuntu repositories”. There was, of course, both command line and GUI tools. I use GNOME so installed the GNOME Internet Protocol Calculator, which was written by Samuel Abels, a Debian community member (I think). What a straightforward and excellent tool this is. Wish I’d had it 10 years ago when I was supporting NT4 networks.
GNOME Internet Protocol Calculator
Just downloaded a .iso disk image using Ubuntu 8.04. The download completes and Firefox 3.0 (beta 5) pops-up its “Download complete” message in the bottom right corner of my screen. I click on that and up pops the “Downloads” list, with my ISO image at the top. I click on the entry expecting a Nautilus window to fire up on the folder in which the file downloaded, but no, it’s more convenient than that. I don’t know whether I have Firefox, GNOME, or Ubuntu to thank, but instead of simply being taken to the download folder, it automatically fires up GNOME’s “Write to Disk” dialog box. Why shouldn’t it I guess? What else was I planning to do with a .iso file?
Trivial perhaps, but sweet.
One of the GNOME features I’ve most come to appreciate since abandoning Windows XP last summer is workspaces (Virtual Desktops on KDE, Spaces on Mac OS X Leopard). I now find these so useful, I simply can’t imagine how I got on without them.
As I write this, I’ve got my code editor, a couple of browser windows, Nautilus, an IRC client and a terminal window open in my first workspace. In my second workspace there’s a text editor containing my development notes (notes I write as I learn new stuff), a document open in OpenOffice Writer, and a couple of FreeMind windows containing a functional overview and database schema outline of the application I’m currently working on. My third workspace contains my email client, news feed reader and the browser in which I’m writing this. This is fairly typical although needless to say some days I have more, some days fewer windows open.
Even with dual wide-screen monitors (I’m using a standard 1280×1024 and a wide 1680×1050), a dozen or more running applications would for me be unwieldy and counter-productive in a single workspace. I generally find three workspaces to be optimal. I’ve adopted a pattern of use in which the first workspace is where I do my main work and monitoring, the second holds supporting applications and reference materials (which would only be in the way in the first), and the third I use for communications and personal stuff, especially that which distracts from the work going on in the first two workspaces. That said, for obvious reasons I regularly bounce my IRC client back and forth between my first and third workspaces and not having my email client in the workspace where I spend most time is not a problem thanks to visual and audio alerts.
The two straightforward keyboard shortcuts for swapping between workspaces and moving applications from one to another use the arrow keys to indicate the direction of movement and make managing them easy. The shortcuts are now as ingrained as any other I use on a daily basis.
When I first saw workspaces I thought “Neat idea, might use them occasionally, but for the most part, no thanks”. They appeared to be an attempt to use a software device to overcome the size limitations of a desktop on a single monitor and I erroneously thought that they had been rendered less relevant by the increasing popularity of widescreen monitors and setups utilizing multiple screens. What I had failed to appreciate is that in addition to their desktop augmenting role, they also play a useful and liberating organizational role, and it’s this latter feature that I’m finding such a revelation.
GNOME allows you to have as few or as many workspaces as you need and so you can tailor them to suit your needs. The keyboard shortcuts for manipulating the workspaces make them fast and easy to work with, meaning workspaces become your friends rather than leaving them as awkward features, too clunky to use productively.
If you have access to workspaces on your desktop, give them a whirl. The idea can take perhaps a little getting used to, but now I have, I couldn’t live without them. Without exaggeration, they are one of the most useful (and simplest) complexity management tools I’ve used.