[openbox] Two x displays (not xinerama) support

Freddie freddie_signup at gmx.co.uk
Mon Jul 18 03:14:29 EDT 2011


On Mon, 18 Jul 2011, Freddie wrote:

> 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?

Sorry, I got a bit confused here. There should be two points:

1. I can use the <desktop>all</desktop> property, but to do that I need to 
know how to specify applications launched on monitor two in the 
<application ...> tag, which I don't, and

2. For existing windows, it would be useful to have an action equivalent 
to <desktop>all</desktop>, which there doesn't seem to be, although it is 
possible to toggle this with ToggleOmnipresent.

>
> 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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>> 
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