Dividing my desk into two work areas

What program or system utility can I use to convert my desktop into two work areas using a single monitor?

Some recommendations for an easy to use application?

Solution 1:

It's called workspaces and if you're running plain old vanilla Ubuntu with Unity, go the to gear icon in the top left of your screen:

then go to:

• System Settings
• Appearance
• the Behaviour tab
• Enable Workspaces

and then press the workspace switcher icon:

and be amazed:

Note: Pressing Super+S¹ accomplishes the same thing.

¹_{Super+S is aka Windows+S}

Solution 2:

I agree with the posted answers; they're the right answers. But there's another option in stock Ubuntu that runs Unity (e.g. 14.04, but not 16.04+) that satisfies one interpretation of the question, and can generally be handy to know

You can easily resize windows to take up half or a quarter of the screen. You can do this with Ctrl+Alt+any number on the num pad (in number mode). This will resize the current window as follows:

• ctrl+alt + ...
• 1: top left
• 2: bottom half, full-width
• 3: bottom left
• 4: left half, full-height
• 5: full screen
• 6: right half, full-height
• 7: top left quarter
• 8: top half, full-width
• 9: top right quarter
• 0: minimize window (I've remapped this to make windows take the full vertical screen height, keeping the current width)

So with one window do Ctrl+Alt+4, and with the other Ctrl+Alt+6, you'll have the screen split into two halves temporarily.

Solution 3:

Tilers are excellent choices.

You can install it the following way:

To install awesome on Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) run the following commands:

sudo apt-get install awesome

You can read more about the tilers in this article and on the AWESOME website itself.