Second monitor and workspaces

When my second monitor is connected to my system, I get four workspaces for each. This is annoying as I now have eight.

I would like to continue using workspaces on my large monitor but have the second sitting only with a single workspace.

Is this possible? If so, how?

Solution 1:

First you can quickly know how many workspaces you have with the following commands, open a terminal and type:

dconf read /org/compiz/profiles/unity/plugins/core/hsize
dconf read /org/compiz/profiles/unity/plugins/core/vsize

It should return 2 for both if you have 4 workspaces.

Now with an external monitor, you don't really have 8 workspaces even if this kind of picture can be confusing because both screen are creating an extended desktop (if you are not mirroring), a workspace is delimited here by the orange line:

To answer your question, there's no way to specify the number of workspaces per display (the unity plugin only store global values) but you can force a given window to stay always on visible workspace. I often do that for my mail client that I left on my laptop monitor. It's like having a single workspace. Just click the title bar of your application and select "Always on visible workspace":