/encircle

A Xinerama X cursor monitor wrapper

Primary LanguageCMIT LicenseMIT

encircle: A Xinerama X cursor monitor wrapper

encircle is a window manager agnostic tool that wraps your X cursor around the edges of the screen and is specifically designed to work with asymmetric multi-monitor Xinerama setups.

In practice what this means is that the screen area is turned into a flat torus in that when the cursor hits a screen edge then it will continue and reappear on the opposite edge.

If the cursor position is not within the target screen then the cursor will snap to the nearest edge of that screen.

By default cursor wrapping is enabled on both horizontal and vertical axes.

   ┌───────┐
   │     1┄┤
   │       │┌───────────────^─┐┌───────┐
   │       │├┄1┄>           4 ││       │
   │       ││                 ││       │
   │   A   ││        B        ││   C   │
   │       ││                 ││       │
   ├┄2     │├┄3┄>             ││   <┄2┄┤
   │       │└───────────────^─┘│       │
   │     3┄┤                   │       │
   └───────┘                   └───────┘

In the above example we have four transitions:

  1. snaps to the adjacent monitor (rather than hitting a hard wall)
  2. wraps the cursor from monitor A to monitor C which is the rightmost monitor
  3. snaps to the adjacent monitor (rather than hitting a hard wall)
  4. wraps around monitor B because there is no other monitor above or below

If the monitor arrangement is changed (e.g. using xrandr) then encircle will be notified of that and update monitor positions and dimensions accordingly.

Installation

$ git clone https://github.com/bakkeby/encircle.git
$ cd encircle
$ sudo make install
$ encircle

This is also available in the AUR.

Dependencies

Arch

  • base-devel
  • extra/libxinerama
  • libxi
sudo pacman -S base-devel extra/libxinerama libxi

Debian

  • build-essential
  • libxinerama-dev
  • libxi-dev
sudo apt install build-essential libxinerama-dev libxi-dev

Void

  • base-devel
  • libXinerama-devel
  • libXi-devel
xbps-install -Su base-devel libXinerama-devel libXi-devel

Credits

This work is largely derived from the dwm window manager in relation to its handling of monitors in a Xinerama setup. The work is inspired by xoop and taralli.

License

encircle is available under an MIT license. See the LICENSE file.