What do I mean by "detached"?
In the herbstluftwm windows manager (and others, notably xmonad), the concept of a "virtual desktop" is removed from the physical monitors themselves. That means that any one monitor can be viewing any of the virtual desktops at a time.
As an example, let's say we had three screens:
[SCREEN 1] | [SCREEN 2] | [SCREEN 3]
and 3 VIRTUAL desktops (in reality it's 9).
[VIRTUAL 1] | [VIRTUAL 2] | [VIRTUAL 3]
Now, imagine I have virtual desktop 1 on screen 1, virtual desktop 2 on screen 2, and virtual desktop 3 on screen 3. I want to be able to change the view to:
[VIRTUAL 2] | [VIRTUAL 1] | [VIRTUAL 3]
without dragging or moving windows in any way.
herbstluftwm's rules are:
- If you switch to a VIRTUAL desktop not already on another physical screen, it replaces the focused monitor's VIRTUAL desktop with the one you want.
- If you switch to a VIRTUAL desktop that another screen is currently viewing, it will swap virtual desktops with that screen.
- The focus determines which monitor gets its VIRTUAL desktop changed. If you have focus on screen 2 and switch to virtual desktop 8, screen 2 views VIRTUAL desktop 8.
What do other window managers do?
The only other environments I have extensive experience with are Gnome and KDE. In both cases, each virtual desktop is really a set of N screens.
So, with 3 screens and 3 VIRTUAL desktops, there are actually 9 "working areas".
If I switch to VIRTUAL desktop 2 while the second monitor is focused, all three screens will change since screens are "bound" to the virtual desktop. There is no separation of screen and desktop.
What I'm asking
First of all, is there a name for this type of functionality? I cannot work without it, and if herbstluftwm never supports Wayland then I'll be stuck on X indefinitely to get this feature.
Second, which window managers support this? Are there hacks / workarounds where KDE or Gnome can behave like this?
