Cinnamon Workspaces - What are they good for?

[smurphos]

The script is just a simple shell script using native tools to monitor current workspace and manipulate the back-end settings for the wallpaper. If you don't mind working in shell script I find it's the easiest way to hack new 'features' into the system. E.g I've got mousescrolling on the desktop to switch workspaces, a cinnamon native screensaver slideshow, a login screen slideshow, and various extra options to my nemo context menus all done in shell script.

One day I'll tidy them all up for public consumption and put them on Github.

In principle an extension would do the same thing but it would use a different base language (javascript) and would use functions provided by Cinnamon's javascript interpreter to do so as-well as to display a nice settings GUI to pick your per workspace backgrounds etc.

The documentation isn't great but what there is here. I've never had the time to delve into this fully and develop my own extensions/applets/desklets. I'm happy bug-fixing and tweaking others work though and a browse through existing extensions code (and the stock cinnamon code) can be informative.

http://projects.linuxmint.com/index.html

https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon-spices-extensions