screencastxmonad
Is it possible to make a screencast (for example of a streaming video) on a nonactive workspace?
I usually use simplescreenrecorder for screencasts and xmonad as window manager, but the solution might involve other software.
Maybe it is possible to make the graphics card send signals to an imaginary second screen and capture the signals there?
Nested X11 sessions are possible with Xephyr, see this example from the wikipedia page:
This is independent of the "base" WM (XMonad), since it's just another X11 client for it to take care of. That said, I have no idea about accelerated graphics in Xephyr, i.e. if Compiz is usable this way...
Yes. There are two ways to achieve it:
A trick to reorder your workspaces (assuming your left screen is the primary screen, you can use xrandr -q to check)
workspaces = ["2:mail", "3:web", "4:dev", "5", "6", "7", "8:chat", "9", "10", "1:db"]
associatedKeySyms = [xK_2 .. xK_9] ++ [xK_0, xK_1]
The key here is the order of associatedKeySyms, since xmonad does not care the names for your workspaces. If you do not display the workspace names on your status bar, this will work. An even simpler way is to just change associatedKeySyms without changing workspaces. However, if you do need to display the workspace names (you may want to see "1:db" comes first and associated with mod+1), then you need to follow the next solution.
Basically you need to hack StackSet in XMonad.StackSet (https://github.com/xmonad/xmonad/blob/master/src/XMonad/StackSet.hs) to manipulate the binding between screens and workspaces. You need to write the code into a startupHook in your config file so that it will be executed when xmonad is loaded.
You may also need XMonad.Actions.PhysicalScreens if you want to specify right or left screens instead of screen IDs.
I just start using xmonad, and I haven't done exactly what you want. I have similar needs, yet not only at xmonad startup. I try to hack both the startup procedure and the rescreen procedure (new monitor connected/disconnected), and hope you find some pieces of my configuration useful when you write yours. https://github.com/subbyte/subXMonad
Best Answer
Notice: this answer is based on my understanding of traditional X11. It is possible that this has changed with the introduction of compositing, in which case the following is wrong, but I believe it's still correct.
No, it's not possible to record what's happening on an inactive workspace.
When a workspace is "nonactive" (not shown), the windows it contains are all unmapped. The applications aren't getting expose events and therefore they aren't actually drawing anything (If an application draws a tree in a forest that isn't displayed anywhere, does the tree really exist?).
For your use case, I recommend that you run the application inside an
Xvncserver and record that. Example with auto-started session:Raw example (start
Xvncdirectly, no security on VNC connections):