Re: [Ayatana] workspaces and multimonitor

[Connor Carney <ccarney@xxxxxxxxx>]

If I'm understanding correctly, GianZap's alternative arrangement sounds similar to the way workspaces behave in XMonad:  Every monitor shows one workspace, but they share the same set of workspaces.  If you have workspace 1 on monitor 1, and open some windows, and then switch monitor 2 to workspace 1, then all of the windows that you had open on monitor 1 show up on monitor 2.  Workspaces in this system are rather like virtual monitors that can be arbitrarily mapped to physical monitors.

It's my personal favourite solution to the workspaces+monitors problem, but it does have a couple of weaknesses:

1) It deals poorly with windows spanning multiple monitors: what is supposed to happen when a window is between two monitors and you switch one of those monitors to a different workspace?

2) There are strange corner cases when your monitors aren't all the same size/shape.  If you open windows on a large monitor, and then switch that workspace to a smaller monitor, some of your windows can end up off-screen.  If you try to resize the windows so that they keep the same relative position on the smaller screen, then you can end up with windows smaller than their minimum size.

On Sat, Nov 5, 2011 at 6:51 AM, GianZap <zappete@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hello everybody.
I have watched the nice video [1] on the planned multi-monitor support for Unity 5.x. I think it is *wonderful*, and would love to use it with my two monitors.
Still, I have a small concern and a brief proposal :)

If I understand it correctly, the planned behavior as shown at UDS-P is:
1) each monitor has its own independent workspaces,
2) you can move windows between monitors, AND you can move them between the workspaces of the same monitor.

My concern is that as one adds monitors, the number of workspaces grows and one could easily get lost. It also requires a bit of abstraction and mnemonics as you need to remember that "Firefox was on workspace 3 of monitor 5".
Moreover, I feel that it would be a nice addition to provide a "physical" way to put the *same* workspace on two monitors, so that they display the same image (i.e. output cloning). Currently one has to setup output cloning in the display preferences.

So I would like to propose an alternative arrangement:

1') there is only one set of workspaces, as many as you want
2') you can choose to put _any_ workspace on _any_ monitor you want, regardless of ordering.

e.g.: a set of 5 workspaces (A, B, C, D, E) and four monitors.
monitor 1 has ws B
monitor 2 has ws E
monitor 3 has ws B (again!! --> cloning)
monitor 4 has ws A

You'd use Expo on a monitor to select which workspace you want to put on that monitor. This way output cloning would be set up just by using Expo and selecting the same workspace on two monitors.
Moreover, you wouldn't need to remember on which monitor *and* workspace sits the Firefox window. As soon as you call Expo on the current monitor, you have a complete overview of every workspace _and_ monitor. I feel this would be simpler and more intuitive, but of course I may be wrong. And I am aware that it is a bit different than the planned behavior. I just wanted to share my thoughts and I'll trust the designers' judgement :)

Thanks for your attention, and for the wonderful work on Unity!
Best,
--
Gian

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=lbwNMnNUGFA

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