I am not a big fan of workspaces on my desktop environments, maybe because to me Alt-Tab is enough. To be honest, I was using workspaces back in my Ratpoison days, but that is not the case any more.

Nevertheless, my daily workflow in Emacs improved so much with eyebrowse I can’t imagine going back to a configuration without it.

(use-package eyebrowse                  ; Easy workspaces creation and switching
  :ensure t
  :config
  (validate-setq eyebrowse-mode-line-separator " "
                 eyebrowse-new-workspace t)

  (eyebrowse-mode t))

As you can see, I am pretty much leaving eyebrowse with its default settings. I removed the comma that was used as a separator between the workspace numbers and made switching to a new workspace start from the *scratch* buffer.

Now my daily workflow in Emacs is thus organised:

  • Workspace #1: this is dedicated to my GTD project, which simply follows the steps Nicolas Petton describes in Orgmode for GTD.

  • Workspace #2: this is for Clojure and ClojureScript development, so everything from CIDER to project specific Magit buffers and EShells ends up here. In the rare case I need to work on a different project, I create a new workspace.

  • Workspace #3: this is the “I need a break!” place. Elfeed is my preferred choice for a quiet and informative distraction. Otherwise, if I just want to hack on my Emacs configuration I do it here.

Combined with Projectile, eyebrowse is the definitive piece of the puzzle I was missing to have an optimised work environment.