I have spent a couple days now playing around with two screens, SLS (Xinerama, Single Logical Screen) and dual head, and I can't report success in finding an ideal solution pertaining to window managers. The short story, for those who don't want to read my ramblings and eexperiences: if you are using a window manager in a dual/multi-head configuration without Xinerama, and you are happy with it, please let me know which one you use and possibly share your configuration with me. The scenario in which I would like to use dual head is a work screen and next to it a screen for GUI applications, like the browser, jpilot, and a mail reader. Furthermore, I want multiple desktops. Running X with Xinerama means that a desktop change affects both screens, which is not what I want. Thus, I want to go without Xinerama. At first, I tried Gnome/Metacity, but I was largely disappointed as applications do not honour $DISPLAY correctly and windows popped up on screen 0 by default, even though I started them from the panel on screen 1. Furthermore, Gnome/Metacity is way too slow for my taste. So then I went back to WindowMaker and got it to run two separate instances on the two screens. Cut'n'paste works, dragging windows between the screen obviously doesn't, but that's fine by me. However, I am still not 100% happy, mainly because of the focus issue. I'll give you two examples, keep in mind that I run 'click' focus mode, that is, I have to click a window to give it the focus. I prefer this to sloppy focus where the window under the mouse cursor is focused. If I am working on screen 0 and would like to switch to a terminal or browser window on screen 1, I have to click on the window title bar -- clicking on the window does not transfer the focus. Within a single screen, however, this works as expected. The second example is related to the previous one. I have Ctrl-Alt-T mapped to give me a terminal window. However, when the focus resides on screen 0 even though the mouse is on screen 1, pressing that keycombo will pop up the terminal on screen 0. Clicking on the background or application clip does not transfer the focus. Thus, in order to open a window on screen 1, one needs an already opened window to transfer the focus to screen 1 -- a bootstrap problem that can only be overcome with the window maker application menu -- which is painful. There are like 40 or more window managers in Debian, and I really don't want to try one after the other. Thus, if you have already made experiences with window managers and multi-head configurations that don't use Xinerama, talk to me! -- Please do not CC me when replying to lists; I read them! .''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@debian.org> : :' : proud Debian developer, admin, and user `. `'` `- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing a system Invalid/expired PGP subkeys? Use subkeys.pgp.net as keyserver!
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