DWM, Xinerama, and where clients initially open

skottish · 2010-03-28 23:20:50

I made the switch today from xmonad to DWM to see if it's a good fit and I have what's hopefully a simple question. I'm running two monitors and DWM always chooses the second monitor to open clients in initially. I assume it's because that's where the mouse pointer is pointing to when it starts. Is there any way to set it to default to the other monitor?

thayer · 2010-03-29 01:38:20

Default behaviour is the load clients in the active desktop (e.g. whichever desktop has the active statusbar). I don't believe it's possible to modify this without hacking the source.

Edit: Mind if I ask what caused you to switch from Xmonad? I thought you'd be a Xmonad'er for life

Last edited by thayer (2010-03-29 01:39:21)

skottish · 2010-03-29 02:28:02

thayer wrote:

Default behaviour is the load clients in the active desktop (e.g. whichever desktop has the active statusbar). I don't believe it's possible to modify this without hacking the source.

Hacking the source is fine. I'm just curious if someone else did what I'm looking for yet.

thayer wrote:

Mind if I ask what caused you to switch from Xmonad? I thought you'd be a Xmonad'er for life

There are two things that got me looking away from xmonad. One of them is that it's far too easy to introduce very hard to track bugs. I can use the exact same xmonad.hs file on different machines and one can function perfectly and the other can be buggy. The second reason is just how difficult it is to get good information not only for xmonad but on Haskell itself. I feel like that I'm swimming upstream constantly.

thayer · 2010-03-29 14:41:19

skottish wrote:

thayer wrote:
Default behaviour is the load clients in the active desktop (e.g. whichever desktop has the active statusbar). I don't believe it's possible to modify this without hacking the source.
Hacking the source is fine. I'm just curious if someone else did what I'm looking for yet.

I don't recall seeing anything about before on the forums, but it may be worth askin' on the mailing list.

skottish wrote:

thayer wrote:
Mind if I ask what caused you to switch from Xmonad? I thought you'd be a Xmonad'er for life
There are two things that got me looking away from xmonad. One of them is that it's far too easy to introduce very hard to track bugs. I can use the exact same xmonad.hs file on different machines and one can function perfectly and the other can be buggy. The second reason is just how difficult it is to get good information not only for xmonad but on Haskell itself. I feel like that I'm swimming upstream constantly.

Both valid points. I really (really) enjoyed using xmonad, but without any knowledge of haskell I felt like I was always at the mercy of someone else. That, combined with its enormous dependencies (for what was the only haskell program on my system), it just couldn't coexist with my philosophies.

Anyway, back on topic. I can't really help much, but could you clarify on the behaviour you'd like to see. Are you saying that no matter which desktop is currently selected it opens all clients on the second monitor? Or, are you saying it makes the second monitor the active screen when dwm starts up?

Last edited by thayer (2010-03-29 14:43:05)

skottish · 2010-03-30 00:04:17

thayer wrote:

Anyway, back on topic. I can't really help much, but could you clarify on the behaviour you'd like to see. Are you saying that no matter which desktop is currently selected it opens all clients on the second monitor? Or, are you saying it makes the second monitor the active screen when dwm starts up?

The latter. DWM starts with screen 2 focused. Everything else works normally.

--EDIT--

Oh boy, it's time to annoy the Arch community again with my on-the-borderline drifting...

DWM has already shown to me bugs and instability, and I've barely even got started. Without being too wordy here, I'm simply going to stay with xmonad... for now, anyway.

eol · 2010-03-31 23:25:02

skottish wrote:

I made the switch today from xmonad to DWM to see if it's a good fit and I have what's hopefully a simple question. I'm running two monitors and DWM always chooses the second monitor to open clients in initially. I assume it's because that's where the mouse pointer is pointing to when it starts. Is there any way to set it to default to the other monitor?

Yeah, really easy and without hacking the source.

Here is another tiny tool from suckless.org :
http://dl.suckless.org/tools/swarp-0.1.tar.gz

Imagine you have a 1440x900 above a 1024x600,
you just need to put :

swarp 512 1200

before the

exec dwm

line in your .xinitrc to have the pointer warped in the center of the non default focused screen
and to have windows opened here as well.

I've read it is too late for you but maybe it will be useful for someone else.

skottish · 2010-04-01 01:10:19

Thanks eol. And it may not be too late for me. When I start to drift between pieces of software that are this important, I often find myself going back and forth. I do have to say that I'm very impressed in how much less resources DWM uses than xmonad.

Acecero · 2010-04-01 02:29:18

thayer wrote:

Edit: Mind if I ask what caused you to switch from Xmonad? I thought you'd be a Xmonad'er for life

That's what I thought when I saw this:

skottish wrote:

The '---EDIT---' is dead! Long live xmonad!

I got a laugh out of that. So much for being long lived.

skottish · 2010-04-03 02:03:57

Wow, swarp works perfectly. And, it's already in community. That would leave only a couple of things that I would have to do if I were to truly entertain switching over...

Long live <place WM> here!

Arch Linux

#1 2010-03-28 23:20:50

DWM, Xinerama, and where clients initially open

#2 2010-03-29 01:38:20

Re: DWM, Xinerama, and where clients initially open

#3 2010-03-29 02:28:02

Re: DWM, Xinerama, and where clients initially open

#4 2010-03-29 14:41:19

Re: DWM, Xinerama, and where clients initially open

#5 2010-03-30 00:04:17

Re: DWM, Xinerama, and where clients initially open

#6 2010-03-31 23:25:02

Re: DWM, Xinerama, and where clients initially open

#7 2010-04-01 01:10:19

Re: DWM, Xinerama, and where clients initially open

#8 2010-04-01 02:29:18

Re: DWM, Xinerama, and where clients initially open

#9 2010-04-03 02:03:57

Re: DWM, Xinerama, and where clients initially open

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