I really like rp on my laptop but find it sub-par on my desktop with two large monitors. I'm curious if others here have found workflows that make rp work well in that context.
During my couple attempts with rp in a multi-million pixel world, the sticking points for me seem to be these:
- Switching windows to something rather far away is complicated. I can see the window 4000 pixels to the left, but I need quite a few keystrokes to get there. Moving long distances poses similar problems, but comes up less for me.
- Workspace support falls down a bit with multiple monitors.
- Windows don't stay put. They are bound within a group, but not within a frame. Example: window X is on the left of my workspace, but I'm viewing window Y in that frame. Now somewhere on the right I close an unrelated window. The frame must be filled, and window X (currently unmapped) is chosen for that frame. Psychologically, I think of X as being on the left, but now it's popped up on the right.
Again, I'm curious if others have these annoyances, which are perhaps solved by simple workflow differences. Or perhaps we can think of ways to improve rp to deal with them.
A couple thoughts.
Change focus / move window. Bind a key that causes all frames to show labels (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and then I hit key "3" to refocus to frame 3 and the ephemeral labels disappear. For move, the selection would cause the current window to move to frame 3.
Workspace support. I think the (version of) rpws I was using just wasn't well tested for multiple monitors, this doesn't seem intractable at all.
Staying put. This is fundamental to how rp currently works, but not necessarily fundamental to how it means to work. I think it's enough to have an option that permits frames to be empty and to remember which window was in which frame. A frame can only be auto-filled by a window in its group that is either assigned to that frame or unassigned (e.g., because it's frame was destroyed). On frame destruction, a window would optionally either be assigned to the frame into which its frame merged or else be unassigned.
I hesitate to suggest that any of these things could be fixed by touching the mouse. ;-)
Before I embark on trying to fix any of this, I'd really appreciate feedback from other users / devs on how welcome such things would be. On the first and third, if I were to do it, I'd probably need some help and pointers.
Jeff Abrahamson
+33 6 24 40 01 57