Treating multiple monitors as one big canvas

[ravish0007]

I've noticed that monitors has their own isolated workspace, Is there a way to configure multiple monitors to contain one workspace and windows keep spawning next to each other and when maximised it occupied the monitor it is in.

[YaLTeR]

There isn't and it would be quite difficult to do, with unclear design questions

[morenathan]

I think you have a good point. When you have a 1/3 display window and a 1/2 size window and another 1/4 window, what happens? Ideally a window would never be split across screen lines.

Personally seeing the option for 'enable-panoramic-view' would be a welcome option! Given the above scenarios Niri should probably just leave the extra space and only present whole windows.

Most of these requests are probably just asking for that. A way to simply have "one screen" where niri will split whole windows across screen dividers, keeping them whole but always scrolling them.

I wonder if it would work to have a set viewport and just have windows scroll through it? Then all desktops would automatically be vertical and bars could just automatically be limited to the active viewport display. So maybe with the preceding concept a single line option of activate-viewport-display "DP-9" could be a thing?

• Nathan

[0xhckr]

I think a nice rudimentary idea could be "if a monitor is 'joined' vertically, the scaled widths must be the same; similarly, if a monitor is 'joined' horizontally, the scaled heights must be the same".

[dominicegginton]

+1 for feature request.

my use case is: opening applications that require to be opened in full-screen across all connected displays

e.g: when using flameshot gui

• flameshot takes a fullscreen (all connected displays) screenshot
• flameshot expects to then open a window to render the screenshot along with its region selection and other GUI tools overlaid

with my current config:

 window-rule {
    match app-id="flameshot"
    open-floating true
    open-fullscreen true
    open-focused true
    default-window-height { proportion 1.0; }
    default-column-width { proportion 1.0; }
}

I would like to be able to assign this application to a dedicated _ gloabal workspace_ that spans across all connected displays. E.G:

window-rule {
    match app-id="flameshot"
    open-floating true
    open-fullscreen true
    open-focused true
    open-on-spanned-workspace true             # open on the global spanned workspace
    default-window-height { proportion 1.0; }
    default-column-width { proportion 1.0; }
}

[YaLTeR]

That's a very narrow usecase that is also more of a hack on flameshot's part. A better way would be to open a fullscreen window per output.

[dominicegginton]

Thank you for your quick response. Ah yes I believe that is how wl-logout handles this situation. I will move my request to flameshot for implement this behaviour. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

[Quackdoc]

I have a similar potential request to this, perhaps more closer to #803 but not really the exact same. I would also like to have multiple monitors act as one single monitor. The goal is an "AMD eyefinity" like experience to run applications across all the monitors at once. IE 3x 1080p displays in a line would be treated as one 5760x1080p display.

I doubt this would be any less work, it's for sure not a strong want, but it is something I have found myself to be missing personally.

[Sempyos]

@morenathan If you want to try this with your LG display it may work better then mine.

[morenathan]

@br0ad I don't have an LG, but did try it on my multi-monitor setup and it does bring all the displays together as one. I think the only thing to "worry" about is any setup involving struts, as niri under cage doesn't respect screen borders(I use struts in my config). Otherwise Cage always opens a fullscreen window and happily scrolls them left and right with the focus always being on a single display.

[morenathan]

A incomplete guide to running Niri on Cage.

• Don't use any sort of horizontal strut
• Don't use the option to center windows by default
• You will always have a cage mouse and a niri mouse pointer
• floating windows will open across screen borders on any even amount of displays.
• Doesn't like to launch niri-session, may need to use niri --session (didn't test) or spawn-at-startup commands for bar and other features.
• Things like bars will stretch across all displays and any setup will need to account for this.
• While focus on windows can go to any monitor the mouse will not follow for the mouse following feature. This probably means though you can use the windows independently because cage has no concept of moving them, but your mouse will initially stay on the primary display.
• Remember, your mouse is the cage mouse and not the one shown by Niri.
• Is there a way to properly order wayland displays under cage? If wlr-randr doesn't work, I don't know how it would work.

Okay, I think that's all I noticed with a quick run through.

[Sempyos]

Did you find any other issues with Cage? And apology, there was a different issue with a LG display wanting this I guess.

[Sempyos]

Oh, thanks, it didn't show up on my view.

[SequentialDesign]

i just want to confirm that doing the following (making two monitors into one) is impossible in Niri :

this is on cinnamon and x11 using xrandr. anyone know if this is kind of thing is possible in any wayland compositor ?

[YaLTeR]

Idk if any Wayland compositor implements this, but just wanted to say that nothing prevents a Wayland compositor from doing it if it wants to. It isn't particularly easy though, and in niri's specific case, the overall UX doesn't work with this kind of configuration with the exception of a few very narrow cases, so it's not worth it.

[Quackdoc]

this claims to, it is smithay based and MIT licensed, I have not tested this so I can't confirm it, nor have I even glanced at the code. Not sure if it can be used as reference or not.

https://github.com/wegel/stilch

[rektide]

@Quackdoc thank you for linking stilch! That also supports the opposite, which is what I want: splitting one display into multiple displays. I have discussion idea #3160 for that.