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Missing option --only-current-screen
Status:
RESOLVED: WONTFIX
Severity:
enhancement
Product:
Xfdesktop
Component:
General

Comments

Description John Feuerstein 2009-10-11 15:59:51 CEST
Created attachment 2598 
Add option --only-current-screen

Hi,

I've added a --only-current-screen option for xfdesktop.
This is useful in some multihead setups.

You can start xfdesktop like this now:

DISPLAY=:0.2 xfdesktop --only-current-screen

This patch happened because there is no multihead support for non-backdrop
settings using xfdesktop-settings. In addition to the --only-current-screen
option (which should save some resources), full multihead support for desktop
icons and menu settings would be great.

This way one could use xfdesktop to draw backdrops on all screens, draw icons
only on specific screens and get rid of the menu on other screens.

Best regards,
John
Comment 1 Brian J. Tarricone (not reading bugmail) 2009-10-11 20:22:18 CEST
I don't really support the old-style multihead with separate X screens.  The 'future' seems to be a single X screen spanning multiple monitors using xinerama or xrandr 1.2+.  Supporting the legacy stuff just adds cruft I'd rather not have to maintain, sorry.
Comment 2 John Feuerstein 2009-10-12 00:26:03 CEST
Brian, I'm sorry I don't get your point about non-Xinerama non-XRandR setups being obsolete. Separate X screens are and will always be very useful. Let me explain:

I'm aware that Xinerama fades in favor of >=XRandR-1.2, so one might call Xinerama legacy. But there *are* some cases where both are not the way to go:

- You use each head for a very specific purpose (eg. TV)
- You want to run different window managers etc. on different screens
- You want to switch workspaces on each screen separately(!)
- You don't want to mess with lots of needless window placement rules

Other problems (might be fixed in the future):
- You use more than one GPU (XRandR 1.2 and 1.3 don't support spanning one screen over multiple GPUs)
- Drivers not supporting XRandR >=1.2 and disabling acceleration with Xinerama
- Other technologies like NVidia's Twinview (which is much like XRandR) don't support rotating single heads and falling back to Xinerama leads to the previous downside

The proposed patch is trivial. I'm pretty sure you could shorten it even more. Please re-think your decision. If you still don't like it, what about multihead support for the "Menus" and "Icons" tabs in xfdesktop-settings, just like for the "Background" tab? This way I could possibly choose to not draw icons on some screens. I'd be glad to help you out with that.

Best regards,
John
Comment 3 Brian J. Tarricone (not reading bugmail) 2009-10-12 05:26:34 CEST
I don't intend to support those use-cases.

Bug #5864

Reported by:
John Feuerstein
Reported on: 2009-10-11
Last modified on: 2009-10-12

People

Assignee:
Brian J. Tarricone (not reading bugmail)
CC List:
0 users

Version

Attachments

Add option --only-current-screen (2.61 KB, application/octet-stream)
2009-10-11 15:59 CEST , John Feuerstein
no flags

Additional information