Date: Sat, 20 Jun 2009 17:27:48 +0100 From: Anselm R Garbe To: dev mail list Subject: [dev] Re: dwm development continues NOW An initial version of the new xinerama support is committed into hg, it's not finished/polished yet, but the basics are usable already. During the development I decided to have a bar per monitor, instead of just one bar. It's less confusing that way. Monitors are currently selected through pressing Mod1-w, Mod1-e (just two initial keybindings), and clients are assigned to the selected monitor and can be re-assigned using Mod1-Shift-w, Mod1-Shift-e resp. There are several bugs still, esp. related to the floating handling (it's currently possible to have a floating client assigned to a monitor even if it's shown on a totally different monitor). The code will have a lot of polishing and some config.h options will go away possibly... one candidate is topbar. Bug reports welcome. Please don't do code reviews yet, I know that it's ugly and needs polishing. Kind regards, Anselm -- Well I rechecked the source and it would make dwm considerably more complex, especially the root window checks would be all over the place. No no ;) Classic multihead support is achieved using the classic way: DISPLAY=:0.0 dwm & DISPLAY=:0.1 dwm & etc Now I'm at simplifying what has appeared so far... Kind regards, Anselm -- I think people on this have lately been confusing "dualhead" with "Xinerama". Someone asked about this earlier, and he just wanted to clone screens. In any case, suppose we have two 1024x768 monitors, we can use them in two ways: MODE 1 - Two X displays, :0.0 and :0.1, each 1024x768 - This is sometimes called "Zaphod" mode. - This mode sucks because you can't move windows from one screen to the other. - This mode is not supported by the intel driver. MODE 2 - One merged display, :0.0 which is 2048x768 or 1024x1536 (your choice) - If I understand correctly, this is Xinerama or mergedFB or TwinView mode. - This requires help from the window manager. - Xrandr lets you switch between 2048x768 and 1024x1536 without restarting X. It's fantastic. You can compile dwm without Xinerama support (#undef XINERAMA) and use Xorg with MODE 2. You end up with one giant display. If you compile with -DXINERAMA, you have what you've described, where the second screen is used for floating windows. "Xinerama support" just means that dwm knows that the giant display consists of two screens, and can avoid using dead space if the screens are different sizes. When people say that xorg is dropping Xinerama support, I believe it's the Xinerama implementation that's being dropped, not the API or wire protocol. XineramaQueryScreens() works correctly on my netbook with xorg 7.3 and intel driver. With that out of the way, I'd suggest you look at dwm-gtx. I tried it on my Acer Aspire One (with intel 945), and it worked well. The difference between dwm-gtx and "awesome" (besides code bloat) is that "awesome" manages tags for each screen independently. If I press MOD-1 in "awesome", it switches the tag on the current screen. In dwm-gtx, it switches both screens.