When installing Haiku and after first boot we find ourselves with the default blue background:
And when we add the Desktop Applet “Workspaces” we find the window at the bottom right of the screen as shown on Picture 1. Yes, using multiple workspaces can improve your workflow, this also would depend on your actual habits and your will to change them, of course ;). Anyway, many users are used to have multiple workspaces to distribute tasks among them and focus on the actual workspace while keeping an eye on others.
Haiku has something that is called “Replicants”, which on other oses are called mostly Desktop Widgets, Widgets, Plasmoids, Applets, Screenlets, whatever. The Workspaces desktop applet also can have a borderless Replicant to get out of the way from the workflow
It’s almost an absolute certainty that one of the first things users do when installing an OS is changing the wallpaper of the desktop. So that is what we are going to do now. We have the 4 default workspaces and we are going to give each a different wallpaper:
The Workspaces desktop applet is telling us on which workspace we are working. But there is something more we can do to improve this workspace identification, and that is, changing the color of the workspace on the Workspaces Replicant so it shows a different color for each workspace.
By doing this, the background of each workspace will change from the default blue to the color we pick for it. For that, we will use the Software “Colors” to pick the color we like, one that matches, sort of, the background image’s palette:
To do that, just click on the color picker from “Colors” and choose any color from the background that you feel identifies most the background image, then drag the color from the “Colors” window onto the workspace you are in. In this case, “Colors” is in the active workspace, the one on the bottom row, right column of the Workspace Replicant.
After doing that for each background image in each workspace we end up with the following scenario, where each workspace in the Workspaces Replicant shows a color that “matches” the background image of that workspace:
We just have to be aware that if we decide to remove the background image, the workspace will show the solid color we have picked for it:
This is another way to visually identify workspaces looking at the Replicant, as long as the background image is not changing periodically.
Go on and start tweaking your Workspaces Replicant with your favorite colors! 🙂
