How multiple displays should work?

Hold the yellow tab, and then ALT+Fkey to move windows to different screens/workspaces. I don’t see why it is difficult to merely continue the Fkey number and have many workspaces on many screens…

2 Likes

Mac OS X has that feature.

1 Like

It may not be difficult, but that’s not the point. The advantage of dual screens is that you can see two documents at the same time. It’s also extremely useful for video-editing, and no doubt many other applications.
Having multiple workspaces isn’t the same thing at all, useful though they may be to some people.

2 Likes

Showing windows on only a single screen at a time seems ok to me. Very rarely do I need a window to span screens, especially with wide-screen displays being common these days. That simplifies the design so you can render the window according to the current screen or workspace resolution.

We already have the concept of a “main screen” that we’ll need to carry forward. For example Deskbar’s Twitcher/Switcher window always displays on the “main” screen.

2 Likes

With the current Haiku incarnation, an application may have multiple windows across multiple workspaces. I believe there is no conflict in showing multiple windows across multiple screens, by moving them to different workspaces…

Except, you point out video editing, which I am assuming is a monolith window sort of idea, which may need one, super-wide, workspace to fill more than one screen.

Is there an example of that? Or is this just a horse a piece?

I am not sure that I understand what you are saying. Are you suggesting that Haiku can currently use two (or more) separate physical screens at the same time, albeit showing one workspace on one and a different workspace on another?

That would work fine for instances where one is working on one document while looking at another. Not sure about the video-editing angle, because it’s necessarily one program.

I hadn’t seen the phrase “a horse apiece” before. Thanks for enriching my vocabulary.

No, it currently doesn’t work that way. Each workspace spans all the displays, and when you switch workspaces, you switch on all displays at the same time.

How about handling it the Mac way? On my MacBook, I’ve configured it so that throwing the cursor into the upper-left corner puts it into Exposé mode, where it shows thumbnails of all the workspaces as they are currently arranged (i.e. window layout) at the top of the screen, and underneath that it shows a jumble of thumbnails of every open window. I can then drag and drop app thumbnails onto workspaces to suit my tastes. And I can also drop a window onto the right half, or the left half, of a workspace, and it’ll go into split-screen mode.

In Exposé, I can also reorder and delete the workspaces themselves; I can, for example, drop Workspace 3 after Workspace 5, so the order from left to right is 1-2-4-5-3.

I’ve been doing heavy media editing for years, I’ve never spanned a daw or nle interface across multiple monitors. I usually have my main display center, and sub displays for plug-in, effects etc on secondary monitors. A multi screen mesh of 1 image is a pretty small use case and not worth the squeeze. Most video games are aware of the multiple monitors and handle them accordingly. That’s probably best for gpu drive game api to call up and handle.

If people are looking for multiscreen video meshing, they make external upscaling devices specifically for that purpose, Matrix makes a whole family of video cards, iirc they have some old open source driver code that exposes this.

Otherwise look at the vulcan gpi code

Discussion above. Haiku doesn’t need to be a swiss army knife when a good fillet knife is required 99% of the time.

Apply K.I.S.S.

10 Likes

Completely agree with @SCollins reasoning.

I like to do NLE, audio, development, rapid web surf or 3D on multiple displays.
It is much pleasant to have multi windows all over the screens than switching from window to window. Its a standard decades ago when it comes to user expirience on PC.

Till the multi display support, ill stick with one ultra wide monitor.

1 Like

I consider multiple monitor support to be essential. Although dual monitor support would satisfy most people.

3 Likes

Is multiple displays support already done? I got Asus AM1M-A mobo wiht AMD Athlon 5350 CPU. It has built in Radeon GPU. The mobo has two video outputs: VGA + DVI.
I can’t get Haiku to split its desktop to both. Screen Prefs shows only one of them.

No,there has been no progress on multiple display support recently.

I need to do a donation then :slight_smile:

Donations to the Haiku project are always welcome,but don’t expect your issues to get instantly fixed then.
There’s no fixed roadmap which feature will be implemented when.
Maybe someone thinks tomorrow that they need multi screen support and has the needed knowledge to implement it,or maybe it still doesn’t work in three years.

Maybe a GSoC 2027 thing?

Multiple display support is convenient when developing - I think we all can agree on that.

But it’s really a requirement when doing presentations (eg. connecting a projector). In some cases, 3 displays are needed on a single setup (because you handle audio/video playback and recording while doing the presentation and on the third display you do other work like editing, finding files, etc.).

I’d expect a window that is moved halfway out of one screen to appear partly on another screen.

(The old Mac OS did support multiple displays - even in different resolutions. I do not know if different resolutions would be relevant these days where most people always use RGB888).

Only if there is a clear plan and architecture decided, and someone willing to mentor it. You can’t just let a person who never contributed to Open Source work alone on a system they probably never heard of before and hope they somehow achieve it where all our existing developers have failed.

I can tell you I have spent quite a few hours trying to bring up a second display in the intel_extreme driver without success.

3 Likes

There are thousands of uses for multiple displays. I find it very difficult to work effectively with only one display, so I use two. Whether there is a case for more than two is another matter. I think the law of diminishing returns comes into play very quickly here, and that whilst two displays represent a huge improvement, a third of fourth display would be of marginal benefit for most people.

1 Like