dmenu multi-monitor issue

asked 2014-11-20 20:06:02 +0000

morl
11 ●1 ●1 ●2

I'm using xrandr for my multi-monitor setup, in the examples bellow $monitor1 is 17" CRT and $monitor2 is 24" LCD. In the simplest setup:

xrandr --output $monitor1 --left-of $monitor2

dmenu will span across both screens which is fine as long as I can see both displays, but I frequently turn the 17" one away from me, to be able to read while in bed, and therefore I can't see "half" of what the dmenu shows on the bigger one while sitting at the desk. To complicate things a bit more, I don't use the above simple setup but do some position adjusting to smooth out the mouse transitions between the screens.

xrandr \
    --output $monitor1 --pos 0x660 --left-of $monitor2 \
    --output $monitor2 --pos 1024x0

The 17" CRT height is of course lower than the 24" one and is located on a lower desk so I set it's logical y-position accordingly, i.e. lower it by 660 px. Also, $monitor2 then needs x-position adjustment by the width of the $monitor1 (1024 px) or else the displays overlap.

This setup makes "half" of the dmenu entirely invisible because it is presumably displayed in the gray area of the entire logical screen, the space above the 17" monitor.

It would be great if I could get dmenu to show only on the currently active display and not be stretched across both, but I don't know where to look since there is quite a few unusual things going on here and I even suspect it might be a bug in dmenu or i3 or xrandr or in my setup or whatever because I really don't know why the dmenu would stretch across the screens when everything else behaves normal. Maybe it matters, I'm using FreeBSD.

Thanks in advance! And by the way thank you for developing i3wm! I really don't like using any desktops but once I've set up i3 it has been working great for me!