Keyboard shortcut to send to display

Submitted by Ian Turner

Assigned to Olivier Fourdan @olivier

Link to original bug (#15114)

Description

I notice that the window manager has a configuration option for shortcuts to send a window to a particular workspace, but not to a particular display. Is this an intentional design choice, or just something that hasn't been implemented yet?

If there's a consensus that we want this feature, I'll give it some attention.

Version: 4.12.0

José Jorge said:

I would like having this feature as part of xfwm.

Alternatives I've seen used for this purpose:

• https://github.com/jc00ke/move-to-next-monitor
• http://ssokolow.com/quicktile/

Simon Steinbeiß @ochosi said:

There already is a similar bug report with patch that does something like "continuous tiling" across multiple monitors. I think the patch needs some work, but could be integrated into xfwm4 (at least Olivier sounded ok with it). I'll try to dig up the report...

Andre Miranda @andreldm said:

@Simon, you mean Bug #11936?

added 5. Keyboard Shortcuts 5. Multi-Monitor labels

@andreldm: presume @ochosi was indeed talking about #181.

added 2. Feature label

mentioned in issue xfdesktop#139 (closed)

mentioned in issue #207 (closed)

Please define "display". Are you talking about another monitor within the same multiscreen setup (xinerama/xrandr) or actually different X displays ? (IOW: are clients started with different DISPLAY env variable ?)

This is about another physical monitor, not another X display.

Okay, so all monitors are in the same X display (equal $DISPLAY variable), mapped into one virtual screen (xinerama/xrandr) ? Good. Sorry for being so nitpicking, but this makes a huge difference (some people still have separate X screens on one Xserver, which is very different from that).

In this case, it should be pretty simple: just finding the correct position and moving the window. The original proposal from jc00ke IMHO is a bit insufficient - just moving to the next monitor - whatever "next" practically means (from user perspective). Maybe it should be like we already have w/ moving to another workspace.

If we wanna have this menu also in the panel, it becomes bit more complex w/ communication between panel and wm, maybe we should do it like we already do w/ workspaces (perhaps even extending netwm spec).

By the way, I'm currently working on another feature that might indirectly solve the same problem: it's about virtual "fences" - screen areas that behave similar to monitors regarding maximization: you can define areas where the window maximes into (instead of the whole monitor) and windows can be sent from one fence to another (even by the application). Usually these are configured explicitly via xfconf, but I could add a switch to automatically populate them from monitors.

What you describe sounds like margins, which is already implemented.

Anyway, I disagree, many users have requested "move to next monitor", and that's a very sensible feature - I am not so sure about a fence mechanism.

See !56 (merged)

Also keep in mind that xfwm4 has tried to follow the KISS (Keep it simple, stupid) method, I do not see complex mechanism as a good thing, unless there is a real benefit for the users.

Maybe you should discuss openly before implementing features that might be denied eventually?