Pervasive contempt

Quite. Not only do I organize workspaces by task, but the assignment is nearly static: some workspaces have had the same task assigned to them for nearly two decades now (though some change much more frequently). So the spatial locations on the workspace grid of tasks I've needed for a long time are very much wired into my memory. As a result, I always know exactly where I am and where everything I need is, without ever needing to think about it. I have hotkeys assigned to such long-term workspaces but I hardly ever use them because a couple of keystrokes to flip to the right workspace by simple spatial navigation is much faster, and in the absence of a working teleporter fits better with the geographic metaphor. And that metaphor is *useful*: geographic location tracking has been wired into our brains since we started walking on land. I think of virtually everything that way, workspaces, inheritance graphs, ownership graphs, filesystem hierarchies, they're all geographic maps of a sort. I'm hardly the first person to evolve this scheme: the old 'palace of memory' trick is doing something similar.

Dynamic grids (and similar things such as the dynamically-changing alt-tab ordering of many windowing environments) *ruin* this sort of geographic metaphor completely. They must not be the only available option, or those of us who use geographic metaphors are left completely out in the cold. (I've been using this metaphor for so long that I actually feel *seasick* in a GUI that uses some other metaphor, as if the solid ground has turned to water, and yes, I get all the physiological responses that go with seasickness, too. Getting any work done in that state is hopeless.)

There's nothing wrong with a grid that expands dynamically as you use more workspaces, but moving existing things around, or changing the navigation between existing things without explicit user permission, will break the model and break the workflow of people like me. (And cause me to lose my lunch!)