The implementation of "workspace on monitor including empty workspaces" selection syntax is unreliable

[code-IM-perfect]

The "workspace on monitor including empty workspaces" selection syntax, which is supposed to translate r~5 to the 5th workspace on the current monitor, is a very useful feature, I am sure at least former AwesomeWM users would agree. Like on AwesomeWM, there were a fixed number of workspaces per monitor, I used the first 3 and the last 2 workspaces just for some specific tasks, so different tasks were mentally separated (this helped me a lot in my ADHD). This feature allows me to fake that on hyprland.

The way it works is (for r~N):

1. Takes all the workspace IDs that are special or already belong to any other monitor
2. Also takes workspaces explicitly bound by a workspace rule to some other monitor
3. Treats all the other workspace IDs as available
4. Now takes all the named workspaces (with -ve ID) on the current monitor and effectively places them before all of the unnamed available IDs
5. Goes to the Nth available workspace

This works...with one issue, which can be demonstrated taking a fresh session:

1. Go to the 4th workspace on monitor 1, open a window
2. Go to the 8th workspace on monitor 1
3. Go to the 3rd workspace on monitor 2, open a window
4. Go back to the 4th workspace on monitor 1....WHERE IS MY WORKSPACE?!

The 4th workspace is the 5th workspace now, cuz one workspace that was available earlier got occupied on the other monitor and is no longer available.

Like in my view this feature's whole point is to fake having a certain number of fixed workspaces per monitor (which is not how workspaces actually work on hyprland), please correct me if this is not what is intended.
But for this to work, the workspaces need to be fixed, this unfortunately is not how this feature is implemented.

What I propose

I propose that instead of this complicated algorithm, we simply use this:

• Add a misc variable: fake_workspaces_per_monitor (default value 10)
• r~N translates to monitor_id * fake_workspaces_per_monitor + N
• r+N, then for (current_id % fake_workspaces_per_monitor) + N between 1 and fake_workspaces_per_monitor would translate to current_id + N
• And like similarly for r-N

Special workspaces are already negative so should not be an issue.

Named workspaces which have a negative ID would not show up this way but imho anyone using this syntax would be prefer having a fixed number of workspaces per monitor and not like shared workspaces.

This is in my opinion much more reliable and is also computationally much easier. I wanted to ask if I make a PR changing this implementation, would it be welcome? Will like some other usecases be hindered by such an implementation?

If not I will make a plugin just for myself but was wondering if I can implement this directly on hyprland. Thanks for this awesome project btw!

[vaxerski]

You can solve this by setting a fixed amount of bound workspaces per each monitor:

workspace = 1, monitor:DP-1
workspace = 2, monitor:DP-1
...

workspace = 11,monitor-DP2

...