On Sat, Mar 12, 2022 at 07:22:11AM -0500, The Wanderer wrote:
> On 2022-03-12 at 01:29, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
>
> > On Fri, Mar 11, 2022 at 03:41:09PM -0500, The Wanderer wrote:
> >
> > [...]
> >
> >> The most important one for my purposes, and therefore the one that
> >> I remember, is the ability to have multiple desktop-like things
> >> which are actually all just viewports on one much-larger single
> >> area [...]
> >
> > There seems to be some basis to it. And some solution. But then,
> > you're perhaps bound to a specific toolkit [1] [2] or perhaps
> > compositor.
>
> > [1] https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-drivers/wayland-display-server/1074550-kde-now-has-virtual-desktop-support-on-wayland
> > and the links therein.
>
> It's more complicated than that, unfortunately.
>
> There's a reason I didn't use the phrase "virtual desktops" in my
> description of this feature; the X spec defines *two* things which are
> sometimes called by that name.
>
> One of them has a single large "desktop" with multiple viewports into
> it; on that one the parts of one window that stick off the edge of one
> viewport overflow into, and can be seen through, an adjacent viewport.
Ah, I see. I dimly remember that one (I'm that old ;-)
> That's the feature I was talking about, but it is *not* the feature most
> commonly called "virtual desktops", although some WMs (including, IIRC,
> e16) do call it that; I don't know if it has any other dedicated name,
> although the X spec does refer to it in different terminology. My
> understanding is that this is the thing the Wayland developers saw as so
> odd that it couldn't possibly be used/wanted by anyone and had to just
> be a historical-curiosity wart on the spec.
>
> The other defines multiple separate "desktops", which are logically
> arranged into a grid for purposes of indexing and access, but which are
> individually independent; anything sticking off the edge of any one of
> them is not visible anywhere. That, as I understand matters, is the
> feature commonly called "virtual desktops". It's my understanding that
> this feature *is* possible via, and maybe even directly supported by,
> Wayland.
And then, there are window managers (Fvwm) which offer "big" desktops
(where the visible screen is a window into, which can be moved around
seamlessly) and then several of that "virtual desktops".
Best of two worlds :-)
Whether it uses that X functionality is an implementation detail I
don't know, alas.
> It's difficult or impossible to tell for certain from the limited
> discussion in the links provided, but it looks to me (having dug through
> as far as the Phabricator discussion) as if what KDE added support for
> is the latter.
>
> (FWIW, e16 apparently supports *both* of these features, although the
> major rewrite that was e17 and later dropped support for the first one;
> that's one of the reasons I haven't moved forward to newer versions of
> Enlightenment.)
I have the hunch Fvwm is for you. I'm using it with one virtual desktop
which is 3x3 the size of my screen ("pages" in Fvwm parlance). Of course
it's segmented as nine pages, but windows sticking out of my current
page end up sticking into the corresponding neighbour. And I can get
my screen (aka viewport) to straddle page boundaries (which I don't do
usually, but hey).
Cheers
--
t
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