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Adding Workspaces / Virtual Desktops in Cinnamon

Mousing to the “hot corner” in Cinnamon gives an overview of current workspaces, à la expose. Unfortunately a careless click can close one of those workspaces, as I found out last night. Equally, you may feel that the default 2 workspaces is too few and wish to expand upon that. Now, I think the numvber of workspaces should increase automatically*, but it’s nice to control such things. Unfortunately there is no “control panel” option to control the number of virtual desktops, and right clicking the workspace changer widget in the toolbar doesn’t seem to have any useful effect.

However, hit Ctrl+Alt+Down and there should be a ‘+’ icon on the right hand side which will add as many workspaces as you require.

Update: Apparently the hot-corner expose has the plus to add workspaces too. I guess I just didn’t see it there! Cheers James.

14 thoughts on “Adding Workspaces / Virtual Desktops in Cinnamon”

  1. I just tried it and the results were spectacular! I now have 4 workspaces and the way in which my hot corners work just proves how wise my decision was to replace my Win8 with this version of Linux. I had a dual-boot with “Mint MATE 64” but it used too much RAM as I only have 2GB.

  2. Ctl+Alt+Up : Displays all workspaces, and in each it shows the applications running therein. In TwinView or Xinerama – ie there is a second screen, shows all workspaces, and in each shows applications running in each monitor.
    Ctl+Alt+Down : Displays the current workspace, and shows the applications running in that workspace. In TwinView or Xinerama, ie there is a second screen attached, shows current workspace on the primary screen with the applications running in that screen.
    This is just my observation when I try each key combination and is not an official answer. Corrections welcomed.

  3. Correction to the above observation – replace observation for the key combination –
    Ctl+Alt+Down : Displays the current workspace, and shows the applications running in that workspace. In TwinView or Xinerama each attached screen is displayed and applications running in each screen are displayed.

  4. ctrl+alt+up into the workspaces in Mint 19.1 Cinnamon 4.0.8

    Update: Use the “shift Plus” above the equal sign on the keyboard while in the show workspaces. New workspaces pop right up.

  5. Update for Cinnamon 4.0.8 Linux Mint 19.1

    ctrl+alt+up arrow into workspaces: Use the “shift Plus” above the equal sign on the keyboard while in the show workspaces. New workspaces pop right up.

  6. Good question @Simon; I’m not sure but you’d think there would be. I might still have a VM with Cinnamon, let me look into it!

    I checked the cinnamon source, looks like there’s an ‘add workspace’ button in expo.js (1) which calls global.screen.append_new_workspace() (2). I’m not sure if there’s a way to do it via CLI out of the box, but in theory I guess it would be possible to create something in node that calls the same thing?

    (1) https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/blob/f800711e14c307d91b6cf59e53228b59651489dc/js/ui/expo.js
    (2) https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/blob/f800711e14c307d91b6cf59e53228b59651489dc/js/ui/main.js#L657

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