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Victor S
Asked: 2011-10-06 20:01:40 +0800 CST

How can I stop workspaces from switching automatically to other workspaces when selecting different applications?

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How can I stop workspaces from switching automatically to other workspaces when selecting different applications?

I personally find it extremely annoying, and bad UI, to have the context/rug/workspace be pulled from underneath me and I want to prevent, under any circumstance, except of my own choosing the automatic workspace re-adjustment program that Unity (and OSX, but that's another story) imposes on me. Is there a way to do this?

Thanks!

UPDATE

The interface solution that I'm looking for exists already in Gnome "Classic", unfortunately it is not as nice of a desktop as Unity or Gnome3, it has a simple bar at the top and an open windows bar at the bottom of the screen, and on this bottom bar there are 4 work-spaces screens on the right side, it is these that work exactly how I imagined a good work-space should work -- that is: in each work-space I can start up an application and if I switch to another one work-space I can start up the same application without being switched to my previous works-pace.

I imagine if this behavior exists already that someone with deep knowledge about the work-space or perhaps a developer that has worked on these or their updated counterpart in Unity could let me know how the appropriate settings can be manipulated in Unity to bring back the behaviour of the work-spaces similarly to gnome 'classic'.

unity

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Actually the easy answer would be to middle click on the app icon in the Unity launcher to launch another instance of the application if it's already opened in whatever virtual desktop you find yourself in.

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  2. I think you may look into running multiple X sessions instead of using workspaces - this way they'll be totally isolated from each other, I think you even may be able to run different window managers in them.

    You can start an additional X server using something like

    startx -- :1

    which you then will be able to access by pressing Alt-Ctrl-F8..12

    I tested it and was able to run a KDE session at Alt-Ctrl-F7 and a Gnome session at Alt-Ctrl-F8, so, as you can see, the isolation is perfect. Though it maybe a bit of an overkill for the problem you have...

    Here's an article showing how to run two sessions with different window managers (tough, of course, you can use Unity on both).

    Note that you need to edit your /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config and set allowed_users=anybody to be able to run as a non-root user.

    There also some restrictions in terms of running two instances of a same program as a same user in two different X sessions, because they may step on each other feet and overwrite each other's settings - so to be able to run, say, Firefox, you may need to create two separate profiles.

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