
Ask HN: 2 jobs, two environments, one laptop.  Any tips? - phamilton
I use my laptop at work and work on my startup at home.  It's a MacBook Pro.  At work I need to have Mail and iCal open, as well as a few stat tracking webpages.  At home I usually have plenty of documentation open (8-10 tabs in Chrome).  At work I'm on a 30 inch monitor.  At home I'm usually sitting on the couch.<p>I'm getting a little frustrated with this setup.  To keep my tab limit down, I close the documentation for my startup when I'm at work.  When I'm at home I close Mail and iCal and the pages specific to work.  If I don't things just get sluggish.<p>Has anyone found an easy way to "switch" environments on a mac?  I could use spaces, but that won't help with performance, it will just get it out of my way.  Any good extensions for Chrome that will let me save a session and let me restore it later?  Has anyone else had this issue?
======
jonhendry
Fast user switching, perhaps?

You could probably create the new account, note the user/group of the new
account, then copy the contents of your main account home directory into the
new user's home directory. Then chown -R as appropriate so that the copied
files belong to the new account.

That ought to give you a second user account, that has an identical
environment to the one you've been using. You might want to use different
desktop images so you quickly know which account is active.

------
jodrellblank
The obvious one is dual-boot.

Really, what kind of MacBook Pro can't handle email, iCal and 10 tabs? What
else is it doing? Can you upgrade the RAM any more? SSD?

~~~
phamilton
RAM upgrade on the way. That may make spaces easier to manage. Right now I've
only got 2GB and its full with 8 tabs, Cal, Preview, and 6 terminals. Usually
I have a dozen or so more disposable tabs.

------
NumberFiveAlive
Have you checked out the tab sugar extension for Chrome yet? I think you can
save your tabs as groups and quickly pull them back up. I messed with it some;
it didn't really do what I was looking for but might be more in line with what
you're describing.

<http://tabsugar.com/>

------
rcfox
I'd be more worried of your employer seizing your startup, since you've been
working on it with their equipment. Either that, or you've been bringing their
information out into the world on your personal laptop, which probably isn't a
good idea either.

~~~
phamilton
This has been a discussion. The laptop is mine. Everything I work on is on
network storage, so I work on our cluster over SSH. The laptop is mostly just
a client, with nothing stored locally. (Email is the only thing I can think
of, and that's IMAP.) Also, we're a 5 man department, so there isn't much
bureaucracy getting in the way of things.

