Switching between X11 screens and workplaces with keyboard

Some time ago I’ve got two monitors connected to my workstation at work. I do not like using Xinerama, so I have, in X11 terminology, two screens, :0.0 and :0.1.

It bugged me that I had to move the mouse cursor to switch between the screens. There must be a way to do it with keyboard, I thought. Some googling revealed a wiki page about dual monitors setup, which had a reference to a little C program, dualmouse.c by David Antliff.

It worked fine if all I wanted to do was to switch from my current screen to “the other one”. But I also wanted to be able to do things like “switch to workplace 4 on screen 0”, and the program could not be used for that.

Fortunately, the wmctrl utility could do things like “switch to workplace 4 on the current screen”, so all I had to do is to modify the dualmouse.c program to support “switch to screen N” functionality, and the rest is, as they say, shell (or Perl) scripting.

The ~/.fluxbox/keys file (if you are using something else than fluxbox, you are on your own here) would have things like:

Control F1 :Exec flux2workspace 0 1
Control F2 :Exec flux2workspace 0 2
Control F3 :Exec flux2workspace 0 3
Control F4 :Exec flux2workspace 0 4

Control Shift F1 :Exec flux2workspace 1 1
Control Shift F2 :Exec flux2workspace 1 2
Control Shift F3 :Exec flux2workspace 1 3
Control Shift F4 :Exec flux2workspace 1 4

And the flux2workspace script looks like this:

#! /usr/bin/perl -w
exit unless @ARGV == 2;
system("dualmouse $ARGV[0]");
$ARGV[1]--;
$ENV{DISPLAY} = ":0.$ARGV[0]";
system("wmctrl -s $ARGV[1]");

Next time: accomplishing the same feat with x2x-controlled displays.