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by simmonmt 3 days ago
Yep. When did virtual screens come in? My last full time experience with X was with Xsun in the early 2000s under Solaris. There was a shared cursor, I thought you could drag windows between monitors, but I also thought the DISPLAY variable was different for each (though I could be misremembering)
2 comments
Liskni_si 3 days ago
2007 is when xrandr 1.2 came and made it feasible to use on a laptop - enable/disable outputs dynamically without restarting X.

Xinerama (the extension that enables one virtual screen over multiple outputs) existed before but the layout could only be defined statically - so you'd need to restart your X server with a different config if you wanted to connect a monitor or a projector or something.

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rwmj 3 days ago
$DISPLAY is definitely different for each X11 screen, ie. :0.0 for the first screen, :0.1 for the second and so on. (:1, :2 is used for more instances of the X11 server).

I can't recall any application able to use multiple X11 screens (except in the trivial sense that you could set DISPLAY when starting the application), and I've been using X11 since X11R4.

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