Double the monitors, double the... confusion?

[afuna]

Temporarily staying in my brother's room / the guest bedroom, sharing with my aunt who's visiting from the US for a month. All this means that I get to use my brother's monitor in a dual-screen set up (...I should see if I can clear out space so I can do the same when I move back to my room)

It's so much better than flipping back and forth between spaces (Spaces?), which is what I was doing before, but I'm finding it tricky to adjust to how my mouse may not be in the screen that I'm looking at right now. It's very easy to lose track of my mouse or active window. The mouse issue is sort of helped by Mouse Locator, which shows a large version of my cursor when I hit some hotkeys.

The absolute best solution, taking the idea from synecdochic, would be to have eyetracking software that would move he mouse to the screen you're looking at (>_>). Since that doesn't exist, I'm playing with the idea of trying to make hotkeye that would reset the mouse to the center of the primary screen or the secondary screen, and at the same time highlight the currently active window.

Maybe something with applescript, though from experience that's going to be slow... hm

Comments

[jadelennox]

http://cameramouse.org/

although I find it really difficult to use.

[afuna]

Oooh that is an interesting piece of software. I know there's a running joke in IRC about how that software *should* exist, I never realized it actually did *g*

(It doesn't work with my OS, but I am just sitting here in awe that it even exists. I mean!)

[synecdochic]

I have that problem ALL THE TIME, omg. I tend to clover-tab through apps, and a lot of times I wind up with irc in front, but reading in the browser, and finishing the tab and clover-W'ing to close the tab ... whups, what do you mean I lost the channel?

[jumpuphigh]

I found that when I was using 2 screens, I eventually started dragging my mouse with my visual changing of screens without even thinking about it. I had a tendency to hover on the edge where the 2 screens met as well. You may find that with time, you begin to adjust your patterns of use to cope.

[afuna]

Yeah, it's been happening slowly, though sometimes I still slip up! It's well worth the hassle though... *g*

[shadowspar]

When I went from one tiny monitor at home to two large monitors at my current job, the increase in screen real estate caused a huge increase in mousing that my wrists & elbows weren't too happy with. The solution that worked best for me was finding a window manager that lets me do almost all the focus-shifting and window-management tasks through keyboard shortcuts -- specifically, xmonad. I don't think it runs on OS X, but maybe there's some kind of app that will let you do something similar...?