[openbox] Openbox Multihead (featuring per-monitor desktops)

[Brian Mattern]

Hi,

On Thu, 11 Aug 2011, Andrew Gallant wrote:

> After a week of hacking, I've turn Openbox's desktop model from "one
> and only desktop visible at a time" to "one desktop visible for each
> monitor activated." This creates the ability to switch desktops
> *independent* of monitor; and any desktop can appear on any monitor.
> I've called it openbox-multihead. [1]

I finally got a chance to try this out. For the most part it seems to
be working. However, one bit of behavior is a bit puzzling.

I have two monitors. On the first, I have a single terminal window open,
the second is empty. If I move the mouse to the empty monitor and try to
change desktops, it changes the first monitor's desktop instead. The
only way I've found to bring focus to the empty monitor (I don't have
"FocusRoot" bindings installed yet) is to try to change to whatever
desktop is currently being shown on that monitor (I assume this won't
work if I turn on "greedy" desktops).

Maybe we could track the "active monitor", updating it whenever a new
window is selected OR the mouse enters a monitor?


> I've include a small Python script 'ob-visible-desks' ...

I installed xpyb and your xpyb-utils lib. The ob-visible-desks script
prints out a single line, but then loses the X connection as soon as
window focus or the current desktop changes (maybe when any X event is
received?). I'll try to dig into it more this weekend, but wanted to
give you a heads up.

> - Develop a pager that works with this new desktop model.

The pager you wrote seems to work, although I'm still on python2.6,
which doesn't have the { x:y for x,y in ... } construct yet. Easy enough
to fix, however.

Anyway, its definitely a good start!

Take care,
Brian

P.S. This is all on ubuntu 10.04, so some issues could be due to older
packages.