Re: Multiple Monitors, Infinite Edge

[William Jon McCann <william jon mccann gmail com>]

On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 12:47 AM, David J Wiebe <davidwiebe2 gmail com> 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.

Two of the issues are discussed in the following:
http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2010-November/015495.html
http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2010-November/015498.html
http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2010-December/016699.html

Jon