Getting more done with elementary OS workspaces

When you spend hours each day juggling browsers, terminals, chat windows, and design tools, virtual desktops stop being a novelty and start being the only sane way to keep your screen from collapsing into chaos. elementary OS ships with a polished, opinionated workspace system baked into its Pantheon desktop, and learning to lean on it transforms how you handle the dozens of small tasks that stack up across a working week. Whether you are patching code at 7am AEST or drafting reports from a home office in Melbourne, a sensible workspace setup quietly does the heavy lifting in the background.

Most users only see two workspaces because that is the default. Underneath sits a flexible system that can scale from a single laptop screen to a multi-monitor battlestation. The trick is understanding that workspaces are not just for hiding windows; they are containers for context. Each one represents a different mental mode, and once you stop mixing those modes, your brain stops paying the switching cost every time you glance at the screen.

This guide walks through practical ways to use Pantheon's workspace features for real multitasking, drawing on techniques that work just as well on a flaky NBN connection in regional Queensland as on a fibre link in Sydney's CBD. You will pick up keyboard shortcuts, layout patterns, and small habits that compound into hours of saved attention.

Understanding how workspaces function in Pantheon

Workspaces in Pantheon behave like physical desks in a shared office: each one holds its own set of windows, and you move between them at will, but you cannot see more than one at a time without lifting your head. The desktop treats each workspace as an independent visual canvas, which means a window you leave behind on workspace 2 stays exactly where you put it when you return two hours later. There is no automatic reshuffling when you plug in an external display at the local café in Adelaide.

The default install gives you two workspaces arranged in a horizontal strip. You can expand that number from System Settings → Desktop → Multitasking, where a slider lets you set the count from one to eight. Most users settle on four because the multitasking view gets harder to scan beyond that. Pantheon also lets you decide whether new windows open on the active workspace or always on a fresh one, a small preference that quietly shapes how your day unfolds.

It helps to think of workspaces as persistent rather than ephemeral. Power off the laptop on the train from Perth to Kalgoorlie, open it again at the station, and the same windows will be sitting on the same workspaces. That persistence is what makes workspaces genuinely useful for multitasking instead of a party trick.

Setting up and configuring your workspace layout

A good layout starts with a question: what kinds of context do you juggle? An accountant in Parramatta might run communication on workspace 1, spreadsheets on workspace 2, and a research browser on workspace 3. A software developer in Hobart might stack code editor, terminal, browser, and documentation across four workspaces in a fixed order. The point is to give every recurring mode its own home so muscle memory can take over.

To set this up, open System Settings and head to the Multitasking pane. Choose a fixed number of workspaces, turn on the dynamic switcher if you want bottom-of-screen thumbnails, and disable "Move windows to the current workspace when switching" if you prefer windows to stay locked to the desk they were opened on. Users on metered mobile broadband often prefer windows to stay put, since a misclick can swallow a window into a workspace you forgot existed.

Once the global settings are dialled in, think about monitor behaviour. Pantheon handles multiple displays by defaulting to a shared workspace set, meaning a workspace on your laptop screen is the same workspace on the external monitor. For someone running a vertical secondary display for chat and reference, the shared set usually feels more natural.

Keyboard shortcuts for quick navigation

Shortcuts are where workspaces stop being a configuration task and start becoming a habit. The defaults are well thought out, and once your fingers know them, you stop thinking about navigation entirely. Super takes you to the multitasking view, the arrow keys move between desks, and Shift combined with the arrows shoves the focused window along with you.

For someone working from a laneway studio in Fremantle with a single laptop screen, the most valuable shortcut is Super plus the down arrow, which drops you onto the workspace directly below. Holding Shift moves the window with you. Super + drag lets you flick a window between workspaces without opening the overview, and Alt + Tab still cycles within the current workspace, which is usually what you want during deep focus.

If the defaults do not quite fit, Pantheon exposes a small set of shortcuts through dconf. Many users bind extra commands through gsettings so they can send the focused window to a specific numbered workspace in a single keystroke, which becomes second nature after a week of use.

Organising apps by project or workflow

The real value of workspaces shows up when you stop using them as a window dump and start treating them as project buckets. Pick one workspace per active project and put only the apps belonging to that project on it. A freelance photographer in Brisbane running three client shoots in parallel might reserve workspace 1 for client A's Lightroom and email, workspace 2 for client B's invoicing and Trello, and workspace 3 for client C's web gallery builder. Closing the project is as simple as deleting the workspace and watching the windows go with it.

Some apps lend themselves to being pinned to every workspace because they cross project boundaries. Calendar, VPN, and a music player are common candidates, and Pantheon lets you mark a window as "Always on Visible Workspace" from the window menu. That setting means the app floats across all your desks, perfect for a reference browser you want within thumb's reach without losing your project focus.

A useful ritual is a Friday afternoon cleanup, around 3pm local time when the arvo starts winding down. Sweep each workspace, close anything stale, archive documents to the right folder, and reassign the next week's projects before logging off. Doing this consistently means you start Monday with a clean slate.

Combining workspaces with multitasking view and hot corners

The multitasking view, triggered by Super, shows every workspace and every open window as a thumbnail grid. From here you can drag windows between desks, send a window to a fresh workspace, or close it without leaving the overview. Hot corners extend that reach: the top-left corner shows the multitasking view, the top-right drops you to a clean workspace, and the bottom corners show or hide all windows.

Pairing these with workspaces turns the desktop into something you can navigate with the mouse alone, which is handy when one hand is holding a flat white from the local café. The real magic happens when you bind specific apps to specific hot corners. Drop the terminal in the bottom-right and the screenshot tool in the top-right, and you stop hunting through dock favourites for tools you use sixty times a day.

Because the multitasking view is the only place where you can rearrange workspaces visually, it pays to spend ten minutes in it during your initial setup. Drag the desks into the order you want them, rename them if you have enabled that experimental feature, and lock in the rhythm. After that, the view is mostly used for finding a window you have misplaced, which on a well-kept setup happens roughly never.

Pairing workspaces with focus and notification rules

Workspaces and notifications have a quiet synergy that is easy to miss. Each workspace can be thought of as a context with its own acceptable level of interruption. Coding on workspace 2, for example, probably should not be interrupted by chat notifications, while the communications workspace on workspace 1 welcomes them. Pantheon does not yet let you tune notifications per workspace, but you can replicate most of the effect by toggling Do Not Disturb on the workspaces that need silence and turning it off only on the ones designed to receive.

elementary now's notifications walkthrough covers the settings in detail and shows how to script a single keystroke that toggles the mode and switches workspaces at the same time. That kind of automation is the difference between a setup that works and a setup that feels like it was tailored to your hands.

When you do need to escape every notification entirely, the per-workspace rule becomes simple: pick one workspace for heads-down work, leave Do Not Disturb on there permanently, and route all incoming pings to a separate workspace you visit only during scheduled breaks. It is the kind of structure that keeps deep work intact across a long Australian summer afternoon when the neighbour's mower is already going.

Troubleshooting common workspace issues

Even a tidy setup can develop quirks, and a few come up often. A window that refuses to move between workspaces usually means the app has set a transient flag, and closing then reopening the window usually clears it. A workspace that disappears after plugging in a second monitor is almost always a display reconfiguration glitch, and the fix is to log out and back in once after the new monitor is connected.

If the multitasking view feels sluggish on an older machine, the culprit is usually the number of windows open across all workspaces. Pantheon renders thumbnails for every window, not just the active workspace, so a dozen browsers with hundreds of tabs will tax the GPU. Pruning the heaviest workspaces brings the overview back to its usual buttery feel.

The last common issue is muscle-memory drift after an update. Pantheon occasionally retires a shortcut or reassigns a hot corner, and the fix is a quick visit to System Settings to confirm the bindings still match what your fingers expect. Doing this once after each release avoids the slow accumulation of little annoyances that eventually push people back to the default two-workspaces setup.

Start by spending one working day with the multitasking view pinned open in your peripheral vision, and pick three of the workspaces you actually used. Rename them mentally to match your current projects, and resist the urge to add a fourth until the three feel completely natural.