Xfce Forum

acppcoder

Member

Registered: 2015-01-24

Posts: 9

panel - autoreplicate per monitor?

is it possible to make a single panel replicate itself across all monitors (scaled to each monitors' size) .. this would make it easier to change between monitor configurations (obviously one can do it manually). do people genuinely like to have different panels per monitor.

What happens at the moment is I set things up for one configuration, but if I add or remove monitors, the result is suboptimal (a screen misses a panel, or I have an extraneous panel sitting on 1 screen). I do personally want them all to be the same (main menu, favourite launchers, workspaces, and window-list). I have one of my screens replicated at another location(where it's the 'only' desktop), but that replicated screen isn't my 'main' desktop since I have a larger monitor only present at my 'main' desktop. And I don't always bother with that convoluted setup .

Perhaps you could simplify a lot of the configuration most people do down to a simple "show on all monitors" vs "just on this monitor" checkbox. Lazy UI is good.

Last edited by acppcoder (2015-01-26 05:03:35)

MountainDewManiac

Member

From: Where Mr. Bankruptcy is Prez

Registered: 2013-03-24

Posts: 1,115

Re: panel - autoreplicate per monitor?

do people genuinely like to have different panels per monitor

That question(?) probably changes due to circumstances. If I'm using a laptop, but have one large monitor at home that I connect the computer to when I am there, yes, I'd generally want a copy of the three panels that I use (with applets/icons/information) to appear on the larger monitor, because that'd be the only one that I'd be looking at when it was in use. If, OtOH, I had a monitor that I used to extend my desktop real-estate (as opposed to just making the screen bigger, as per previous example), and had them side-by-side in order to do so, I'd want to extend my top and bottom full-width panels to go all the way across both monitors, and my left vertical "mini-panel" (just large enough for five quadruple-sized (double-height, double-width) icons) to stay on the upper left side of the left-most monitor, for it would be an annoyance to me if it appeared every time I moved my mouse through the corresponding area on the right-most monitor, causing said panel to appear; I would assume that an appearing/disappearing item would be harder to "edit out of my vision" than the bezels of the two monitors, so it would be a distraction to my productivity (IMHO).

IDK if it would be more complicated than the developers would wish to tackle, but how about a "Monitor Profiles" feature? User could add/edit choices such as Home, Work, Three Monitors in "Flight-Sim" Configuration, or whatever he/she desires, and set them up (once). If the specific physical configuration can be determined by the system (IOW, every monitor profile has a unique set of {number of monitors, resolutions, monitor identifiers, et cetera} then allow the option of automatically setting the correct profile, otherwise only allow manually picking the correct profile (perhaps via a keyboard combination) but, again, the profiles need only be set up once each, so picking the profile would be a quick thing.

Hmm... Yes, probably a lot harder to code than to describe, lol. It'd be nice, though....

Regards,
MDM

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Mountain Dew Maniac

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sixsixfive

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From: behind you

Registered: 2012-04-08

Posts: 579

Website

Re: panel - autoreplicate per monitor?

>is it possible to make a single panel replicate itself across all monitors

well i dont think this makes much sense because your new monitor is probably still you first screen expanded, but with a bit scripting you could parse & modify xfce4-panels configuration(~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-panel.xml) with an udev rule - anyway i've never tried this so I could be totally wrong here...

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