Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!jfc
From: jfc@athena.mit.edu (John F Carr)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Multiple Screens and Pointer Tracking?
Message-ID: <14380@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 18 Sep 89 06:21:54 GMT
References: <8909152100.AA07252@kelly.>
Sender: news@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: jfc@athena.mit.edu (John F Carr)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 34

In article <8909152100.AA07252@kelly.> marvin@kelly.UUCP (Kyle Marvin) writes:

>I'd be interested to hear from anyone else who's worked with/on a
>multiple screen server or just has a strong opinion on the subject.

The X server on the IBM RT supports multiple screens (in fact, I have
3 in front of me right now).  They can be placed in any order, but
only horizontally.  I've never felt any desire to have vertical
stacking, since I don't stack my hardware.  There are runtime options
to identify the top and bottom edges of the screen (so that the cursor
appears at the bottom after moving off the top), or the right and left
edges of the extreme screens.  If both options are selected the
display is like a torus.

There certainly should be an option to choose the order of the screens
(due to limitations of desk space and cable length, the physical order
of my screens is restricted, and I want the logical order to match).
With the RT X server, the screens are assigned in the order they are
listed on the command line.  The server lacks a method of assigning
numbers to screens independently of right-to-left order; this would be
a good addition.  

A suggestion:  If the hardware screens are labeled "a", "b", and "c",
support options like this:

	X -b 1 -c 0 -a 2

to make the screens come up in logical order "b", "c", "a" numbered
1, 0, and 2 respectively.

The Xibm multi-screen support is unlikely to change much for R4; I
haven't paid attention to any other servers.

    --John Carr (jfc@athena.mit.edu)