On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 8:28 PM, Brandon Allbery <allbery.b@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 4:39 AM, Hans Chen <hanswchen@gmail.com> wrote:

From what I understand xmonad creates virtual root windows on each screen to detect if focus should

xmonad neither uses nor cares about virtual root windows; they're the sort of thing desktop managers use. Where did you get this idea?

http://code.google.com/p/xmonad/issues/detail?id=40

Note that it was fixed in xmonad 0.9. I haven't looked at the actual source though, I just assumed that the solution was similar to the one described by the Issue.

Instead it is rather likely that xmonad is lazy about the notion of screen focus; in many ways, a workspace with no windows "doesn't exist" even if it's on a screen, because in practice a workspace is defined by its windows. In particular, much of the concept of "workspace" is created by the layoutHook, which usually doesn't do anything if there are no windows.

Well, as mentioned, it works fine without plasma-desktop running. It's no biggie since I mostly use the keyboard, but it would be nice to fix for the few occasions when I use the mouse.

Hans