On 2013–01–21 Uli Schlachter wrote:

> Well, look at your config. What do you see? For example, it takes
> the number of screens and creates tags for these screen. So fixing
> this requires at least another config break which is something that
> I'd like to avoid in the near future.

Maybe it's a little late now, but with awesome 3.5 the config
already underwent massive changes, so it would be just the right
time for another change. I personally don't mind breaking the config
if it makes sense to me and improves usability.

> When awesome starts, it creates a screen object for each screen and
> only later does things with the rc.lua. So a screen can uniquely be
> identified by its index in some array and the C core does this a
> lot.
> 
> Now imagine that screens can appear and disappear freely.

That would be awesome (from a usability standpoint :)

> We now have to properly clean up behind old screens and make sure
> that nothing still refers to it, else we get random crashes. This
> means some non-trivial amount of work is involved.

What's the difference to the current situation of having, say five
clients on each screen and disconnecting one of them?

Attaching a new screen seems to be a trivial operation. Nothing
refers to the new screen and it should not be too difficult to
restore the state of the old one. I agree that it gets complicated
if there are clients on several screens and those screens are being
disconnected. I think clients on removed screens are just placed on
the first tag using the default layout. So apparently this situation
has already been taken care of.

But as I said, I don't know the internals and probably underestimate
changes required by this feature.

> It's doable, but other stuff is more important.

That's arguable :) I agree if you use a desktop with a static screen
setup. But if you use a laptop and reconnect your screen 4 times per
day, you will re-state you priorities.

I don't know how other window managers deal with this issue. Do they
all completely lose the state and fall back to the default window
configuration?

Marco

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