Re: Multiple Monitors, Infinite Edge

[Adam Williamson <awilliam redhat com>]

On Mon, 2010-12-06 at 23:47 -0600, David J Wiebe wrote:
> I have not been subscribed to this mailing list for very many days so
> please forgive me if this has been already been discussed at length.
> 
> However, at the moment gnome shell does not work well with multiple
> monitors.  Gnome shell makes extensive uses of the idea of an "infinite
> edge".  Some examples being the Activities being activate as a top-left
> hot-corner, the notification bar at the bottom of the screen, the sides
> of the screen to resize windows, in overview mode to drag the
> applications across workspaces, etc.
> 
> My current setup is the following.  I have a very small main monitor
> being my netbook (1024 x 576) and a slightly larger external monitor
> (1024 x 768).  Here is an ASCII diagram to represent what it looks like
> +---------+----------+
> |   1     |    2     |
> |         |          |
> +---------|          |
>           +----------+
> 
> Because of the height difference in the two monitors my mouse can move
> below monitor 1 making the notification bar difficult to activate.
> Using the over view mode to drag applications across workspaces is very
> difficult and using the right edge of monitor 1 or the left edge of
> monitor 2 is difficult to hit exactly right on the right side that I
> want the window resized on.
> 
> So what do I want?  First, I would like designers to be aware of this
> issue.  The infinite edge is not ineffable.
> 
> Second, in my opinion some of these can be fixed without too much work.
> We can have the notification bar activate if the mouse is below or on
> the bottom row rather than just on the bottom line.
> 
> I'm not sure about hitting the edge between the two monitors.  As a
> suggestion, possibly holding in Ctrl would activate "sticky mouse" which
> would act similar to the sticky window add-on to compiz works so my
> mouse would "stick" to the center line on the side from where it is
> coming from.  This is not an intuitive solution at all and would need to
> be learnt but at least having an ad-hoc solution would be nice for now.
> 
> There are other issues with multiple monitor support but from reading
> bug reports and the gnome shell wiki I'm confident these will be dealt
> with.

yeah, I keep bumping into the message tray problem. I'm wondering if
there is / should be a tracker bug for multiple monitor issues.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net