Multiple monitors with Aerospace + SketchyBar

[alcidesmig]

Hello everyone!

I used to use yabai + sketchybar, but I'm migrating to aerospace + sketchybar.
In a multi-monitor setup, I'm having a hard time getting the desired behavior. I'd like each monitor to only display the workspaces associated with it. I've tried a few approaches, like multiple bars, items associated to specific displays, but I haven't managed to get anything to look good.

Currently what I have is that all the bars appear on all monitors and when I change the workspace in one display, the change (i.e., the highlighted workspace in the bar) happens on all monitors (leading to wrong highlighting on displays other than the one where the change happened).

The important sections of my config files are:

# ~/.config/sketchybar/sketchybarrc
sketchybar --add event aerospace_workspace_change

for sid in $(aerospace list-workspaces --all); do
    sketchybar --add item space.$sid left \
        --subscribe space.$sid aerospace_workspace_change \
        --set space.$sid \
        background.color=0x44ffffff \
        background.corner_radius=20 \
        background.height=20 \
	background.border_color=0x00FFFF \
	padding_left=7 \
	padding_right=7 \
        background.drawing=off \
        label="$sid" \
        click_script="aerospace workspace $sid" \
        script="$CONFIG_DIR/plugins/aerospace.sh $sid"
done

# ~/.aerospace.toml
exec-on-workspace-change = ['/bin/bash', '-c',
    'sketchybar --trigger aerospace_workspace_change FOCUSED_WORKSPACE=$AEROSPACE_FOCUSED_WORKSPACE'
]

[workspace-to-monitor-force-assignment]
1 = 'main'
2 = 'main'
3 = 'main'
4 = '27GL'
5 = '27GL'
6 = '27GL'
7 = '2718'
8 = '2718'
9 = '2718'

Thanks in advance.

[kaynetik]

Up! 🚀

Actually facing the same conundrum at the moment as well.

[jdurand]

I'm encountering the same issue and currently relying on a workaround in my SketchyBar config, which is far from ideal and prone to breaking. Here's the function I use in my setup using SbarLua:

-- Map monitor IDs between AeroSpace and SketchyBar
local function sketchyBarMonitorId(monitor_id, total_monitors)
  return (total_monitors > 1 and monitor_id == 1) and 2 or (monitor_id == 2 and 1 or monitor_id)
end

A good workaournd would be to have a SketchyBar command that directly outputs a monitor ID-to-name mapping. Similar to what AeroSpace provides:

$ aerospace list-monitors --json
[
  {
    "monitor-name" : "VP2771",
    "monitor-id" : 1
  },
  {
    "monitor-id" : 2,
    "monitor-name" : "Built-in Retina Display"
  }
]

[wesharper]

It's not super ideal, but I was hacking at this and came up with a few workarounds here: #607