Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: Proper virtual desktop / spaces for multiple monitors (i.e. independent, per-monitor spaces)

- DESCRIPTION: Right now it isn't possible to switch workspaces on two or more monitors independently. This is possible on Mac, and is a huge productivity boost. Coming home from work to use my personal Ubuntu machine always feels like a step backwards for this reason alone.

I want to be able to have one monitor for my IDE, and one monitor for terminal /vim, browser instances, music, etc. I like to keep different virtual desktops "scoped" to different things--eg. "documentation and code" vs "personal email". When I switch between these on one monitor, it also switches the space on the other monitor. They should be entirely independent of one another.

If I'm looking at something on my left monitor, but want to look at something different on my right monitor, why make me switch both of them away? The lack of ability to independently control the desktops on each monitor makes me super sad. :(

This is what XMonad does by default - I hate it, but you apparently don't, so you could switch window managers to get this, if you wanted.

What parent describes is what most (all?) tiling window managers do. However, XMonad's default is really weird. Instead of each desktop having their own set of workspaces, there is a single set of workspaces shared by all desktops. If you try to switch desktop A to the workspace currently shown by desktop B, then B will switch to the one currently shown by desktop A.

There is a module to get the more 'normal' behaviour of each desktop having its own set of workspaces, but it can be a bit difficult to set up if you are not familar with Haskell.

See I think xmonad's behaviour makes intuitive sense and all the others are weird. If I want to see my Slack window on the monitor in front of my face I don't have to worry about remembering what monitor it was last on, I just call up workspace 3 and bam it's there.

Just wrote the same thing and would love to see this. It's the only thing that makes me consider moving to Gnome 3 as that will treat additional monitors as it's own workspace. Really miss MacOS handling of this as it's so seamlessly integrated.

A huge +1 to this.

My main system right now is macOS with 2 screens. 1 Main screen for all my development/browsing with 2 desktops, personal+work. Second screen for things that are always there no matter what desktop the main is on, such as IM/email.

I can absolutely understand why you would want this, but for me it'd be a huge net negative. I'd guess that points towards it being a configurable option somewhere.

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