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In ubuntu 10.10 I have a dual monitor setup. I have an nVidia graphics card and am using twinview. One of the monitors is 1024 pixels high and the other is 900. In the monitor configuration screen & in real life, I have them set up side by side, 1024 on the left.

The result of this is that when I am on the bottom of the left monitor and move the mouse to the right, it goes into the hidden area below the right monitor's visible area.

It seems like it would make a lot more sense for it to be bumped up to the bottom of the right monitor - since one almost never wants to move the mouse into an area of the screen that doesn't show up. And, systems I have used before have been set up that way.

How can I set this up?

I am not interested in lists of window managers for ubuntu; I would like to know the identity of a particular WM or set of steps I can take to solves the particular problem I have outlined above. Thanks!

EDIT: I changed to use two seperate X window monitors, and it works better. if you cross in an area that the target monitor doesn't cover, the software just puts you at the nearest point to where you crossed.

EDIT LATER: You can use XCreateMouseVoid to do this; I used it to improve the setup even more in Connecting two monitors at the corners

using XCreateMouseVoid has the advantage of letting you use just one X window, so Alt-Tab shows all windows and you can move them between the screens without any dead areas.

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  • +1 This happens for me too but I think fixing it will actually make the mouse hit the corner when moving to another screen where earlier it used to enter blank space (your bottom right corner)
    – Ashfame
    Mar 8, 2011 at 5:17
  • it should just interpolate across... why would anyone ever want to move their pointer to a non-displayed area? Mar 8, 2011 at 6:19
  • Right now I can move my mouse along the line in the screenshot. img6.imagebanana.com/img/wcfpgt86/Workspace1_031.png What I meant was that, my mouse would collide with the bottom portion of the left border of the right screen which will soon turn annoying.
    – Ashfame
    Mar 8, 2011 at 18:47
  • @Ashframe yeah, that would be annoying too. but I think overall it'd be better, because on the left monitor when you moved the mouse down to the bottom of the screen it would not keep going into blackness. Anyway I think it'd be cool to be able to control whether the mouse goes into black space. In windows I believe the mouse never goes into black space, and it interpolates where the mouse should be - if you leave the right monitor near the bottom, you'll show up near the bottom of the left monitor. it makes sense. Mar 9, 2011 at 3:04
  • I forked the XCreateMouseVoid code in the bug comment into my github so it would be easily available and can be tweaked if necessary.
    – Cas
    May 19, 2011 at 0:58

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Roughly speaking, the answer is “you can't”. It's filed as bug 389519 and is mostly-fixed upstream (there's a patch-series that implements pointer barriers, and this is one of them).

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  • thanks RAOF. that thread also mentions some manual fixes which I'll try out. Mar 9, 2011 at 9:33

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