Bind a Workspace to Multiple Monitors

[mabourehab]

Hey everyone,

I have a small question. I have multiple setups (1 at work and 1 at home). I prefer to keep 1 hyprland.conf file between all my machines for easier maintenance. In both setups, I connect to a secondary external display and make that my "primary". I like to always bind workspace 1 to the external monitor. This can be done easily with the following workspace rule:
workspace = 1,monitor:DP-1

However, in the other setup, the monitor is not called DP-1. Therefore, I want to try and make a rule that will bind workspace 1 to whichever of those monitors when it finds one of them. There will never be an instance where both are connected at the same time.

Here is what I tried:

Attempt 1:
workspace = 1,monitor:HDMI-A-1,monitor:DP-1

This attempt only bound the workspace to the last monitor in the line.

Attempt 2:

workspace = 1,monitor:DP-1
workspace = 1, monitor:HDMI-A-1

This I believe caused none to work.

Appreciate the insight!

[vaxerski]

you can't do that.

[khushal-solves]

Hi @vaxerski, I also desire something similar.
I want to be able to see only one single workspace on 2 monitors and all other workspaces are visible only on primary monitor.

Is this workspace based mirroring achievable?
Maybe only activating the secondary monitor (in mirror mode) when we are on a specific workspace.

[khushal-solves]

I ended up duplicating a window using window-capture from obs-studio.

It doesn't duplicate/mirror the whole workspace but duplicating a single window was enough for my use case.

[ExploHash]

I have the same issue, I have 3 different setups: home, work and client. At the moment I change my config everytime, but would be nice to be able to define multiple setups.

[khushal-solves]

Hi @ExploHash , I know you want a native solution but did you try defining 3 different setups each in a separate file and soft-linking one of them using a script to a filename that you included in hyprland.conf

It basically has the same result but you can use keybindings to toggle between setups.

[ExploHash]

Thanks! Actually not a bad idea, might even make a script which listens to uevents and changes based on monitor description.

[PatrickFranken]

@ExploHash have you done anything on that idea? I'd be very interested as I face the exact same issue.

[hyperdotbat]

if you use multiple devices I advice you checkout Chezmoi
eg. in my dotfiles: https://github.com/hyperdotbat/dotfiles/blob/master/dot_config/hypr/monitors.conf.tmpl

[ExploHash]

@ExploHash have you done anything on that idea? I'd be very interested as I face the exact same issue.

Not yet haha, have graduated since that comment haha. But it's still on my list!

[RAPSNX]

Hey,
I ran into the same issue for months, but ended up with a workable solution.

I’m not sure exactly since which version, but Hyprland can now reload workspace= rules without requiring a relog. With that in place, I’m using kanshi to manage different monitor setups.

In kanshi, each profile supports an exec= hook that runs after the profile is applied. I use that to run a script which generates a workspace config for this profile (written to ~/.config/hypr/workspaces.conf).
This file is then sourced from the main Hyprland config.

One caveat, you need to temporarily switch to some spare workspace for all monitors before rewriting the config.
I handle this by switching all monitors to a high-numbered workspace, updating the config, and then switching back.

It’s a bit hacky, but seems to work.