Shared workspaces across monitors

[YannikSc]

As mentioned niri is inspired by PaperWM. Which I absolutely love, btw! One feature of PaperWM however, which I heavily used, is missing in my opinion and that one is, that the workspaces are shared across the monitors.

While it looks a bit messy, code wise, to implement that I don't think it's too far off and it would be a super cool feature, or am I the only one feeling that?

[YaLTeR]

You can move workspaces to a different monitor with a set of binds like:

    Mod+Shift+Alt+Left  { move-workspace-to-monitor-left; }
    Mod+Shift+Alt+Down  { move-workspace-to-monitor-down; }
    Mod+Shift+Alt+Up    { move-workspace-to-monitor-up; }
    Mod+Shift+Alt+Right { move-workspace-to-monitor-right; }

That's as shared as they will get. I personally find the way Paper does shared workspaces a bit weird, especially when your monitors have different resolution.

[salman-farooq-sh]

Is there a wayland solution for treating multiple monitors as a single large one like X11 had?

[YaLTeR]

Wayland has no say on this. The compositor is free to do this, but it needs to be implemented.

[ArijanJ]

I would also like to see this happen, but since you've mentioned not liking it, here are a few of my use cases for it:

• watching a movie on workspace 9 on secondary monitor, being able to bring it to my main monitor by doing mod+ctrl+9 while focused on my main one - if I do this right now, I have to move to an empty workspace on my main monitor, then focus the secondary one and move the workspace to the left output
• having a "swap monitor workspaces" bind for something similar to the above
• having an app hidden somewhere out of view and instantly being able to bring it to whichever monitor i want by doing mod+ctrl+3 (and then alt+tab when I'm done with it)

The main issue is that all workspaces are locked to a monitor, even named ones. Do you think something like this could ever be done, or is it simply not in scope for niri? I guess what I'm trying to do is use the horizontal scrolling but have more fine-grained control over where each workspace goes.

[YaLTeR]

having an app hidden somewhere out of view and instantly being able to bring it to whichever monitor i want

Sounds like #845 will solve this

The main issue is that all workspaces are locked to a monitor, even named ones.

Btw there's a move-workspace-to-monitor command that might help in some of these cases