[Xmonad] Xinerama & switching workspaces

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

dave:
> Hi all,
> 
> Having finally submitted that last assignment for the semester the
> time to bail on Ion and embrace xmonad has arrived for me ! :-)
> 
> First let me say, well done.  It works very nicely and I'm very
> impressed (have been for a while even without using it).
> 
> So now I come to a question, I have a xinerama setup for my laptop
> that means I can plug into a monitor and have two screens.  My usual
> usage involves me having to go hunting through workspaces to find
> where I left a particular client window open (a terminal, web browser
> window etc).  What I'm finding at the moment is that as I move through
> the workspaces, at some point I select a workspace that's on the other
> screen to the one I'm working on, and by selecting that workspace I
> move to that other screen.  Then as I continue looking through my
> workspaces, I pull them to that screen instead (I flick fast ;-) ).
> 
> So the question is, how do other people solve this problem (ie. how do
> you cycle workspaces to find something you want in xinerama without
> getting thrown around between screens) ?
> 
> And, is there a better way to find something on another workspace ?

I use the state logging facility, and xmonad-status.c to display a
little status bar showing the current workspace, and those others with
clients on them -- I'm actually addicted to this script now.
It takes the logging output, and prints it as:

    1 2 [3] 5 8

giving the indices of non-empty workspaces, and the focused one.
Pipe that into dzen, and off you go. Examples in XMonadContrib/scripts/

I the darcs version, you enable this by setting logging = True,
and having xmonad-status.c built and in your path. 

We're just about to move this printing stuff into Config.hs too, so you
can print your own formats to stdout.

-- Don