Run one screensaver across multiple monitors

I contacted Jamie Zawinski, author of xscreensaver, to ask whether it can span one screen saver across multiple monitor, and he gave me this response:

No, it doesn't do that by design because I've tried it and with 99% of the savers it looks like shit. For the ones where it doesn't look like shit, One Saver Mode looks the same.

I guess he's referring to the bezel gap between monitors making the image look odd as it transitions between monitors.


I'm a few years late with this, but its something we've wanted for a very long time. I've written a poor quality patch against xscreensaver 5.40 to force one hack over multiple monitors. Details here.

In my opinion about 95% of the hacks look excellent across a triple monitor setup. Some needed their settings tweaked slightly to enable more sprites/objects rendered, as there are significantly more pixels to fill.

I'll also contact Jamie to see if he has any interest in properly adding "One screensaver over all monitors" to the mode list. It should be reasonably simple, but is beyond my skill level.

Update 20181101 - Jamie replied with some suggestions to remove xinerama and vidinfo support attempting to achieve same result. He still objects to a bezelgapped 2-monitor solution, but understands that 3 might look ok.