Re: Re: [dwm] dwm-1.7.1

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| (this could be used in a multihead setup)

Personal opinions ahead, but they might be of interest
as real-world experience with dualhead setup :-)
In my experience, dual-head doesn't combine flawlessly
with the "zoomed & stack" approach because of human
issues. Firstly, (I'd imagine that like me) most people with multihead
setups have them to display more things, rather than the
same numbers of things bigger. Certainly I tend to find myself using
two/three "full length" columns and maybe just one "slave" column
quite a lot. Secondly, if you put two screens
with the join directly in front of you you really want to be
able to put the stuff you're primarily working on near the centre rather
than always off on the far left. Thirdly, even if you have one
"zoomed-ish" client it's still useful to be able to rearrange
the order of "slave" clients, eg, so you can put two things
you want to compare by flicking your gaze between them
close together. Lastly, again with this extra space you might want
to use a mix of "naturally tall clients" (eg, text windows) and
"naturally wide clients" (eg, time series graphs) on one view.

I've tried to partly address these issues in my large numbers
of clients patch (such as in the still flakey "move client to
position x in displayed clients" functionality), but I'm not
particularly satisfied with the result; the patch is a hack to make
things more usable for me without completely rethinking
the layout, its code and implications from scratch. That'd be very interesting to
do, but I myself don't have time at moment.

Note that this is just pointing out that with multihead the
"human issues" are at least as important as extending
the single-head paradigm in a logical and consistent way.

cheers, dave tweed
Received on Thu Sep 28 2006 - 18:13:20 UTC