[openbox] Two x displays (not xinerama) support

Mikael Magnusson mikachu at gmail.com
Sun Jul 17 09:57:54 EDT 2011


On 17 July 2011 13:14, Freddie <freddie_signup at gmx.co.uk> wrote:
> I have two monitors attached to an nvidia card.
>
> As I wanted only a single virtual desktop on my secondary monitor (while I
> have multiple virtual desktops on my primary monitor) I opted for separate x
> displays rather than twinview/xinerama (plus, xinerama cocks up gdm3).
>
> One issue I have, which I don't know if it's possible to work around, is
> that I would like to be able to transfer a window from display:0.0 to
> display:0.1. Does anyone know if this is possible? I suppose this is not
> openbox specific but I thought I'd ask.

You can't, that's sort of the point of xinerama. A program can open
both displays and move their windows between them, but it's not
something the window manager can do for them. Afaik, only gtk-demo and
emacs (File -> New frame on display) have this feature though :).

> A second solution would be if there's a better way to support two monitors
> with some configuration of openbox so that I can switch virtual desktops on
> monitor 1 without changing which virtual desktop is displayed on monitor 2.
> From my understanding of xinerama this isn't likely.

It's technically possible, but it doesn't mesh well with the wm-spec
which openbox follows. Ie, any pagers and panels would be terminally
confused about those windows, there is only a single 'which desktop is
this window on' property per window, and one global 'which desktop is
the user on' property on the root window. For this specific case,
maybe you could simply mark all windows on monitor two as 'All
Desktops'? Unless you also want to switch virtual desktop on monitor
2, but you didn't say that :).

-- 
Mikael Magnusson


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