Whilst many people prefer actual screen real estate, with increasingly higher resolution monitors available, for some, physical space prevents expansion to bigger physical screens and those higher resolutions. This is where “virtual” desktops come in. With the re-release of 7th Software’s once commercial MoreDesk as freeware, a comparison of three “virtual desktop” applications for RISC OS may be useful.

First up is VirtuDesk, from David Llewelyn-Jones’ Flying Pig stable, which was last updated in June 2004. I remember using the app on a RiscPC many years ago, and was surprised it still worked. But work it does. Running it loads an icon next to the Display Manager (although this is configurable), which is a deceptively complex navigation tool! Clicking the centre dot of the icon will bring up a grid of nine “desktops” that show you where your current widows are. Clicking top, bottom, right and left on the outer ring of the icon will move you through the grid of desktops, even doing diagonal moves! Very clever.

Clicking menu over the icon, reveals a Configure… option which allows you to set such things as the number of desktops available in the grid, and how big the window grid appears. It also allows changing the colour of windows, including a separate colour for the selected focus window, which is useful, plus more navigation options for moving windows between desktops – probably the main function of many virtual desktop applications. It already seems simple enough that windows can just be pushed from one window to another, or opened in the currently selected virtual desk space.
Whilst it is possible to run VirtuDesk as a very simple virtual desktop application, it does have a few very nice features that make it an incredibly useful tool, if you want to avoid complicated bells and whistles.

Next up is David Ruck’s WorkSpace, last updated in 2015. Upon loading, WorkSpace presents an icon with six coloured monitors on the left hand side of the icon bar. Each of these functions as the means of selecting each desktop. They can either be clustered as a block of six, or as a long row of six monitors, although this uses up quite a lot of the icon bar space.

There isn’t a way to expand the number of desktops available, but each desktop can operate at a different resolution and pallete, which is a useful tool. As opposed to VirtuDesk where windows can be pushed between desktops, WorkSpace seems to require a menu option to “fetch” windows to the current desktop. This can be accessed by clicking menu over the particular workspace.

There is also a neat trick that clicking menu over a window’s Back icon allows you to send the window to another workspace, or all workspaces! Nice. A hotkey can also achieve the same, by selecting a window, pressing the hotkey (the default is Ctrl, Shift, Tab) and selecting which window to send it to. Perhaps a slightly less “featured” affair than VirtuDesk, but again, a nice, simple tool.

Finally, MoreDesk – perhaps the pinnacle for features in this roundup of virtual desktops. Even installation is more complicated than the usual RISC OS “drag and drop” standard. There is an installation app, which installs the libraries that MoreDesk needs, checks the versions of other software installed (i.e. !Confix) and drops MoreDesk into the Apps folder. Assuming everything went well, double clicking the MoreDesk icon in Apps will load to the right of the icon bar. Again, this position is configurable.

Clicking on the icon will reveal a grid of (initially) four desktops. Any filer windows open are represented by a “directory” icon, whereas open applications show the application’s icon. So it’s easy to identify each window’s function. An adjust click on the icon will reveal a smaller grid whereby it is easy to select the desktop to work on.
Windows can be dragged between desktops and easily moved around, much like the best of both VirtuDesk and Workspace.
The choices for MoreDesk are immense. Each desktop can have a different backdrop and a different pinboard, for example. This can be a little bit of a faff to set up (or maybe that’s just me!) but is an incredibly useful tool. As can naming individual desktops. Combining these features can make it feel like working on separate computers, it’s that powerful.

The number of desktops is configurable, but instead of being laid out in rows or columns, it is based around expansion around the primary desktop. So you can have desktops above, below, left and right of the primary desktop. This allows up to 49 desktops (a grid of three above, three below, three to the left, and three to the right!)! Where would one get enough backdrops for that many desktops?!

There are so many fine settings for the way MoreDesk works that it really needs to be tried to appreciate the complexity of what it can do. It really is the pinnacle of manipulating the real estate available to your RISC OS machine. It can even tell you what it’s doing, via the Speak module!

In summary, they all do what they do very well. Each has it’s own strengths, either in the simplicity of their use, or in the complexity of what they can achieve. Comparing MoreDesk to the other two is, to some degree, like comparing ArtWorks to Draw – same basic concept, but one does SO much more!

There are a few other notable applications that do simi8lar things, such as WindowMan by Chrs Bell and VDesk by SymbioSyS. They’re all free, though, so it’s probably worth downloading them and finding the one that suits.