So I took the plunge and got Ventura Public Beta installed on my MacBook Air.
Contrary to my own skepticism on this, I actually like Stage Manager. The reason I do is that it makes task modularity the default rule to be excepted only when explicitly declared by the user.
My task modularity approach with spaces defaults to task unification
For a long while, I’ve been using a tiling window manager (TWM, in my case Amethyst) and spaces to group apps for different tasks.
While I like this modularity approach, sometimes I forget to open a new space to accommodate a new window for a different task. When you use floating/overlapping windows, it gets messy. When you use a TWM, it just gets smaller.
If we consider the task modularity paradigm is that:
- when a new window is created it belongs by default to the current task (space)
- only by explicitly declaring it belongs to a new task (i.e. moving it to a new space) it will disentangle from the current task (space)
Stage manager changes de default to task separation
By default, Stage Manager open every new window in its own workspace (not sure about this word, but will use it to separate it from the concept of spaces). It works pretty much as if it opened a new space for each new window. Pairs can be created by moving an existing window into the current workspace.
This changes the defaults to:
- when a new window is created it belongs by default to the a new task (worksspace)
- only by explicitly declaring it belongs to a same task (i.e. moving it to an existing workspace) it will entangle the given windows.
This little change in the defaults is allowing me to keep a tidy desktop with much less effort than before.
For TWM folks out there, Amethyst does not work properly with Stage Manager, but Swish works great (except for the resizing of adjacent windows that must be turned off).