GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 133337
support moving windows from one screen to another in non-xinerama multihead
Last modified: 2014-10-10 14:51:13 UTC
I personally dislike xinerama, the way it spreads the desktop but i really like dualhead without using xinerama. Because that way the context of the different monitors get separated. However the only thing i miss is being able to move a window over to a different screen. This is possible using gdk and it would be a great feature that when you edge on the display while draging a window that it'll move it over to the different screen.
this is certainly non-trivial. What do you dislike about Xinerama, exactly? At this point I see no reason to use true multi-head at all...
I dislike xinerama because it makes all the screens one big desktop while i really like the separated context for the different screens. The only thing i miss in this setup is the inability to move a window to a different screen, using metacity atleast. This is not very trivial although a lot can be discovered using gdk. But i am not sure if such a feature would be welcome, i would like to investigate the possibilities tho.
*** Bug 170828 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This is going to involve first a spec for how to tell an app to move one of its windows, second GTK+ supporting said spec, and third metacity supporting said spec. There have been proposals for this spec on xdg/wm-spec-list already, not sure of the status. This bug does raise perhaps an additional issue, which is that we want to tell gtk which workspace the window should come back on in addition to which screen.
I would think that the target workspace should be the active workspace.
*** Bug 171751 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I confirm I'm experiencing this too. It seems the focus switches screen when switching workspaces, unless there's a window on the workspace which gets the focus. When switching screens, the focus doesn't follow either, unless there's a window which get the focus. Additionally, when switching workspaces to a workspace with no window, when releasing "Ctrl-Alt", the workspace switcher does not disappear on the second head. Everything is fine on the first head.
Loïc: those things are unrelated to this bug report (though you probably marked it as such due to the very general title this bug has)
(Sorry, I meant to update bug 171751 instead of this one.)
Can someone give a status update on this feature req.? I would love to see this kind of support for dual head setups in metacity/gnome. Is some of the work of comment #4 already done?
I don't know of any significant work in progress here. It's a ton of work relative to the benefit, really, which is why no window manager or toolkit has ever supported this. I would be surprised if it ever happens. But, sometimes for something like this someone who really wants the feature decides to put in the work, so that's why the bug is open I guess.