[openbox] Two x displays (not xinerama) support

Freddie freddie_signup at gmx.co.uk
Sun Jul 17 19:27:41 EDT 2011


On Sun, 17 Jul 2011, Mikael Magnusson wrote:

> 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 :).

This is actually the conclusion I've come to. The next problem is finding 
how to mark windows on monitor 2 as omnipresent, as so far I've only come 
across "ToggleOmnipresent", which isn't quite what I want. Am I missing 
an action/property?

As an aside, what do other xinerama users do about setting background 
images? I wanted to set two images, one for each monitor. The only tool 
I've found to allow placing an image at a coordinate is hokum, which 
actually works quite well.

Thanks,

Freddie

>
> -- 
> Mikael Magnusson
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