More widescreen discussion

[johnstegeman]

My primary monitor that i use at a desk is an ultrawide (49 inch). I also use the macbook pro built-in screen as well. I'd like to use aerospace on the wide monitor, but it doesnt really conform to how I use the monitor. Rather than discuss workarounds, I thought I'd start a discussion to uncover the common usage patterns for these kinds of screens. I'll share 2 that I use:

With certain apps, such as video editing software like Adobe Premier, I am OK with the one app taking up all of the screen, or at least most of it. This does not work for most apps though
I think of my screen as having 3 main zones, left, right, and center. The center zone is slightly larger than the left and right ones, and its where I put whatever app (browser, ide, etc) that I am doing the main work in there. The left zone also tends to hold a single app - often Slack - that has secondary focus. It could also hold some reference material that I need to refer to for my main task. My right zone tends to have multiple apps - usually as floating windows that dont take up the full vertical space. Messages, terminal window, calendar, sometimes email, etc. Most of the time when I run an app during the day, I want it in that right-hand zone.
The second usage pattern is the one I use 99% of the time, and the one that doesnt work so well with aerospace. I feel like aerospace would need a fork, or a different "mode" to support that pattern. I could make it work with some of the enhancements being discussed (eg max-window-width), but i wonder how hard it would be to either fork the project (yuck) or come up with a new mental model/mode specifically to support an ultrawide. I'm not a Swift programmer, but I do write code in other languages, so I've cloned the repo to see if i can figure out how to implement a different mode.

The only window manager I've found that would work decently with my usage pattern is BentoBox (assuming that it can support floating windows), but I really like the aerospace's key bindings and event model, so I'm willing to invest some time to see if I can make something work.

[iandol]

I'm not sure what is not working, though I don't use a widescreen I do often partition left | right. One problem I had initially was that changing mode or orientation of right-side also caused an effect to the left, and I realised this was because of this default setting:

enable-normalization-opposite-orientation-for-nested-containers = true

If set to false, then you can swap orientation or into accordion in one side without impacting the other. I tested with 3 zones and it also works, but you have to make sure you have joined the correct windows together, I suppose it could be fragile if you join-with the wrong direction in the layout?

[johnstegeman]

One thing I can’t really do is to make the middle zone slightly larger than the others, say a 30-40-30 layout instead of a 33-33-33. I also don’t see how to make the windows in the right zone to automatically float.

[iandol]

For sizing if there is no children in the container then smart resize will grow that node, so if you have horizontal tiles |1|2|3| and focus 2 and smart resize, then as 2 grows, 1 and 3 shrink. But once there are children in the container, then the smart size command applies within the container I think. To impact the container I think you must use a dumb resize and the correct dimension, so lets say I have horizontal |1|2a/2b|3| and focus 2b (vertical tiling inside container 2) and use resize width +50 this applies to the container width not the children heights. It is then easy to get 30:40:30 or some such. Adds a few more bindings.

For floating that is harder, though if your windows remember their location they can be first sized manually then hopefully keep that position. The main issue is you really need a phantom window to keep the parent container occupy the space, not sure how to do that, my hack would be open a terminal window with transparency and no window chrome that is not floated, but indeed this is not ideal. There must be a more elegant way for that?

[johnstegeman]

I've been experimenting with a new "ultrawide" mode that, instead of each workspace having a single root tiling container, it has 3 - with new commands to send the window to one of those containers, and each of the 3 behaves just the same as the current 1 does. Once I have something that appears to work, I'll post a link to the code for others to have a look. Using Cursor has gotten me a good way there, but its not quite working yet.

[Anaxagoras-bc]

@johnstegeman how's it going? i've been using aerospace with an ultrawide, and i'm facing similar challenges, additionally when going back and fourth between external ultrawide monitor and internal macbook monitor because now i need to rearrange everything.