Not used Xmonad, but I've been saying for years Enlightenment (e17 and up) is the only window manager that lets use multiple virtual desktops (workspaces?) and physical monitors in a sane way; namely I can swap workspaces on one monitor without it effecting the other.

Gnome, KDE, LXDE, Mate, Cinnamon (and windows 10) all seem to assume that I'd only every be doing the same thing on both monitors which just seems inherently wrong.

There are three philosophies to deal with multiple workspaces and multiple monitors:

* one pool of WSs for all monitors (gnome,mate,win10)

* one shared pool of WSs for each monitor (xmonad)

* one pool of WSs for each monitor (awesome,dwm,e17)

So what xmonad has is one set of workspaces and each monitor can pick one from the shared pool! It's so great to have a WS dedicated for WWW on a side monitor and when something important comes up, I can bring that WS to the main monitor. Not easily done with the last idea.

Oh, very clever; I didn't realise there were 3 distinct behaviours. Options two and three seem to make sense; I find it hard to believe anyone actually wants type 1. I'll definitely have to have a play with xmonad now :)

macOS also gets multi-monitor right. It even gets it right if your monitors have different DPI.

i3 also has excellent monitor/virtual desktop support.