LinuxMusicians

I've got Ardour set up so the editor is on workspace 7, the mixer on 8 and plugins on 9 and 10.

The mixer quickly gets bigger than my one monitor so I'd like to have the mixer span two (or more) workspaces.

I'm using i3wm, but if anyone has managed this on any window manager I'd be interested to hear how.

In fvwm, virtual desktop can be larger than screen, so there you could have Ardour window bigger than screen size.

http://www.fvwm.org/documentation/manpa ... .html#lbBW

So you could define your desktop size to be for example 3x width of your screen, and then define keyboard shortcuts to select which page on same desktop you want to see.

Thanks tavasti.

I'm using FVWM. It allows windows to be extended off the physical screen and appear on the next 'page'. So I can have a mixer any number of physical screens wide!

FVWM has been described elesewhere as 'pathologically configurable' and I've been down that rabbit hole for the past couple of days.

merlyn wrote:FVWM has been described elesewhere as 'pathologically configurable' and I've been down that rabbit hole for the past couple of days.

I was using it something like 20 years, until support for separate X screen on each display (without xinerama) disappeared. Until that point, I had separately controllable virtual desktops on each screen. When that disappeared, virtual desktops were switched same time on both screens, and I had to find new window manager.

In case you want some ideas, here is my fvwm2rc

Thanks!

It's full of ideas. I'm using 2.6.9 so the syntax is a bit different but it's easily adapted.

What window manager do you use now?

merlyn wrote: What window manager do you use now?

Awesome. Haven't got all the fvwm stuff there, it is really different. Tiling modes are totally different from my previous idea 'I decide what size & where are my windows'.

tavasti wrote: I had separately controllable virtual desktops on each screen.

I was looking at the FVWM FAQ and I saw this :

http://www.fvwm.org/documentation/faq/# ... he-screens

Is that what you were talking about? That seems like a diffrerent instance of FVWM running on each monitor.

merlyn wrote:

tavasti wrote: I had separately controllable virtual desktops on each screen.

I was looking at the FVWM FAQ and I saw this :

http://www.fvwm.org/documentation/faq/# ... he-screens

Is that what you were talking about? That seems like a diffrerent instance of FVWM running on each monitor.

Yes, that is feature I am talking about, and fvwm works great. But unfortunately XFree86 does not support separate X displays for screens anymore (so called Zaphod mode), and multiple displays form one X screen, and therefore fvmw will also have only one desktop.

It was interesting to try FVWM but I've gone back to i3wm.

There were some issues with FVWM :

(1) Windows couldn't be identified precisely.

(2) Xorg cpu usage went up to 70% when opening the Ardour mixer.

(1) could be worked around. FVWM takes a string and checks it against the window title, then class, then resource. It's not possible to tell it to only check one, so the Ardour editor and mixer can't be distinguished. I could work around that by only specifying settings for the mixer.

(2) This was a deal breaker. I don't understand this but opening the mixer even if it wasn't visible made Xorg cpu usage go up. This also happens on i3wm but to a lesser extent. 30% on i3wm versus 70% on FVWM. (According to htop so the percentages are of one core.)

Trying this gave me a better idea of how screens, workspaces and desktops work and I discovered that the seemingly unnecessary complexity of audio on Linux also exists when dealing with monitors and the visual aspect.

The idea of a virtual desktop bigger than the physical screen is good and it goes back to the beginnings of X. For some reason this has gone out of fashion and the only window managers that I know of that still use this idea are FVWM and Compiz, neither of which seem suitable for my purposes.

So the answer to my question in the title of this thread is -- no. The idea of a 'workspace' excludes the possibility of a window spanning two of them. Workspaces are independent and disjoint. Although desktop environments may lay out workspaces in a grid that makes it look as if workspace 1 borders onto workspace 2 and extending a window off the edge of workspace 1 should make it appear in workspace 2 that is not the case.

merlyn wrote: (2) This was a deal breaker. I don't understand this but opening the mixer even if it wasn't visible made Xorg cpu usage go up. This also happens on i3wm but to a lesser extent. 30% on i3wm versus 70% on FVWM. (According to htop so the percentages are of one core.)

Oh that is pity. So only available solution is to get more & bigger monitors

I improved my Xorg cpu usage when opening the Ardour mixer. It now goes from ~1% with only the editor open to ~12% with the editor and mixer open.

The problem was with the settings for my graphics card.

I have an AMD R7 260X and use the radeon driver.

The settings are changed by editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-radeon.conf These are the settings that give me good 2D performance. :

merlyn wrote:I improved my Xorg cpu usage when opening the Ardour mixer. It now goes from ~1% with only the editor open to ~12% with the editor and mixer open.

Did you try fvwm with these settings?

tavasti wrote:Did you try fvwm with these settings?

Yes, FVWM uses ~15% now. It's a bit higher than i3wm, but not much.