getmouselocation and getdisplaygeometry return screen 0 on a multi-screen system about xdotool HOT 7 OPEN

X11 is old and has some confusing concepts like a human would say “I have three screens” about a 3-monitor setup but with Xinerama, the display system says “I have one screen and it is huge” to encompass all 3 physical displays.

i am in favor of adding Xinerama (aka: better multi-display support) support to the commands listed in this issue 👍🏻

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@lanrat Sorry for the delays. Are you using Xinerama to achieve multiple screens? Or not?

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If you aren't using Xinerama, youc an try specifying a screen specifically with the DISPLAY:SCREEN notation:

# Get the mouse location according to screen 2
DISPLAY=:0.2 xdotool getmouselocation

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I am using Xinerama, here is the output of xrandr (so that you can see my screen setup).

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 5120 x 1080, maximum 16384 x 16384
DisplayPort-0 connected 1920x1080+1280+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 477mm x 268mm
   1920x1080     60.00*+
   1280x1024     60.02  
   1440x900      59.90  
   1280x800      59.91  
   1152x864      75.00  
   1024x768      70.07    60.00  
   800x600       60.32    56.25  
   640x480       66.67    60.00  
   720x400       70.08  
DisplayPort-1 connected 1920x1080+3200+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 477mm x 268mm
   1920x1080     60.00*+
   1680x1050     59.88  
   1280x1024     60.02  
   1440x900      59.90  
   1280x800      59.91  
   1152x864      75.00  
   1024x768      70.07    60.00  
   800x600       60.32    56.25  
   640x480       66.67    60.00  
   720x400       70.08  
HDMI-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DVI-0 connected 1280x1024+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 338mm x 270mm
   1280x1024     60.02*+  75.02  
   1152x864      75.00  
   1024x768      75.08    60.00  
   800x600       75.00    60.32  
   640x480       75.00    60.00  
   720x400       70.08 

getmouselocation always returns screen 0, although the offset seems correct.

$ xdotool  getmouselocation
x:1778 y:776 screen:0 window:10903159

getdisplaygeometry always returns this, regardless of which monitor the active window is on.

$ xdotool  getdisplaygeometry
1920 1080

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Hi @jordansissel ! Can I pick up on this discussion? Is there a way to use xdotool getdisplaygeometry with accurate results when using Xinerama? I'm using dwm which I believe uses Xinerama.

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DISPLAY=:0 for most people nowadays: if you have multiple monitors, you rather use xrandr --output ... --mode ... --pos ... to arrange them to form a virtual desktop. (At least that's the most common setup with open-source drivers: AMD or Intel or Nouveau, but proprietary nVidia drivers have alternative ways, so you might instead set it up so that xrandr sees one big virtual screen.) (I generally run on Radeon graphics and use arandr, which is a graphical control panel that detects monitors and helps to write those xrandr scripts.) And xrandr with no arguments shows the outputs.

xdotool apparently doesn't have code to query which output the mouse is on, which indeed makes this less than useful for most people. It should be added.

BTW that's not the end of it either, because the newest thing is yet another abstraction: "monitor" https://keithp.com/blogs/MST-monitors/ I'm not using MST so I don't care, but some users probably will.

What I was hoping to do is run a script to open several terminals on the screen on which the mouse is located at the time I run it (from an openbox menu entry).

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This might not be the same issue but I came to report something similarish where in xdotool always gives me NOT where my mouse is but rather where the most recent active window is. I use this to launch applications on the correct XScreen but this often fails because I have to click on a window on the desired XScreen before xdotool gives me the correct result.

Now there is a curious caveat to this issue. So for example if I say am on XScreen 0.0, move to 0.2 then use a keybind to launch something on 0.2 it will launch on 0.0. However if I say run this (line below) as a test in a term and move my mouse around it will track correctly...

while true; do xdotool getmouselocation ; sleep 2 ; done

Xinerama is for combining screens which is the opposite of what you want when you are separating GPU's workloads etc. xrandr can not run this correctly (yet) as the provider syntax was just added and has serious problems basically making a brutally crippled xinerama style config. Two GPU 8 screens split into 2 (3 technically) XScreens so I can delegate/segregate GPU workloads.

As a note it might be good to change the OP title to multi XScreen because you can have many screens without an XScreen, or without Xinerama. The key here is XScreens be them on a single GPU or several. As a note on my "technical" 3 XScreens I have to further separate a few screens with the third XScreen to counter some fun geometry issues with software KVM. So while 0.1 and 0.2 reside on the same GPU I still need to separate things and be able to launch on the right screen denoted by mouse position.

Given this is open and 9 years old I'm guessing this will never be addressed. There is a degree of irony in returning the XScreen when it can't...hehe.

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