Comment 4 for bug 602298

Thanks, wvengen.
My main answer to the "what for" and "why" questions is the dead areas as well. I played a little bit with xfce4 yesterday and couldn't make it show the status bar (or panel I think it is) properly without recurring to nvidia-settings to either fix the offset or enable panning.
I'm currently using sawfish as WM (yes, I know... but it's very very lightweight and fast) and sometimes the middle button menus appear in that dead area, or windows are partially placed in there - I find panning to be a nice workaround, and don't mind the screen moving (in fact, I think it's quite cool).

I have seen another use case where users just want an extra inch all around; surprisingly, it's quite useful (my hack doesn't support this, though).

How would you use it? I suppose you could take a virtual screen parameter for the whole screen and then build the metamodes based on that. The parameter can be optional, in which case you wouldn't have panning at all. It could accept "auto", in which case you would do what my hack does. And finally it can accept the actual full virtual size of the n screens, in which case you use that to calculate panning on an individual basis.

Regarding how unclean my hack is, if I can think of a way to refactor the way disper -e is executed, I'll definitely post it here as a patch. In the meantime, I'll keep this in my local copy of the repository. I am not experienced enough with X, WMs and nvidia, so it takes a while and I drive as carefully as I can.

Thanks a lot anyway, this is a very useful tool!