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Multiple displays work on X11 by having one big canvas/virtual display, and having each monitor show the contents of a part of that canvas. There are some rest

by sspiff 3y ago

Multiple displays work on X11 by having one big canvas/virtual display, and having each monitor show the contents of a part of that canvas. There are some restrictions because of this. One is that per display scaling is unsupported in the worst case, or a hack in the best case. Another is that the virtual display is always a rectangle, meaning that if you have different resolution displays, you end up with some parts of the canvas not being displayed anywhere. Most window managers and desktop environments know not to place window contents or UI chrome there (like panels), but the space is still there, and you can see this when using screenshot utilities which simply write the whole canvas to a file. Your mouse pointer can also hide in these invisible sections. Getting X11 to display content on video outputs located on different video cards from different vendors can sometimes feel like a dark art, but other than that it mostly just works.

saurik 3y ago
1) FWIW, I understood that, given the xrandr explainer that I linked, which was clearly doing all of that ;P. 2) Regardless, the person I'm replying to was using i3 (and is now using Sway), so I'm thinking that a lot of these limitations don't matter much? I mean, with i3 you aren't even going to ever have a window crossing the boundary between two monitors much less ending up off-screen somewhere. 3) I use a ton of random monitors at wildly different resolutions on Windows and frankly it's the same thing: there is a conceptual bounding rectangle for all of the monitors and you can absolutely have Windows hanging off the edge of monitors; also: I don't know how you expect anything to support non-rectangular screenshots so all of my screenshots on Windows--as well as my VNC servers--all have the same behavior with dead space. 4) Ok... I guess I can see the mouse thing being really annoying (as on Windows at least my mouse is locked to the visible area), but it doesn't seem to actually be the case? Again: maybe this is a documentation issue? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34092554/x11-restrict-mouse-to-visible-area https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34092554/x11-restrict-mo...
- sspiff 3y ago
  Either you edited your comment, or infinitely more likely, I replied to the wrong comment

by sspiff 3y ago

saurik 3y ago

1) FWIW, I understood that, given the xrandr explainer that I linked, which was clearly doing all of that ;P. 2) Regardless, the person I'm replying to was using i3 (and is now using Sway), so I'm thinking that a lot of these limitations don't matter much? I mean, with i3 you aren't even going to ever have a window crossing the boundary between two monitors much less ending up off-screen somewhere. 3) I use a ton of random monitors at wildly different resolutions on Windows and frankly it's the same thing: there is a conceptual bounding rectangle for all of the monitors and you can absolutely have Windows hanging off the edge of monitors; also: I don't know how you expect anything to support non-rectangular screenshots so all of my screenshots on Windows--as well as my VNC servers--all have the same behavior with dead space. 4) Ok... I guess I can see the mouse thing being really annoying (as on Windows at least my mouse is locked to the visible area), but it doesn't seem to actually be the case? Again: maybe this is a documentation issue? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34092554/x11-restrict-mouse-to-visible-area https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34092554/x11-restrict-mo...

sspiff 3y ago
Either you edited your comment, or infinitely more likely, I replied to the wrong comment