autorandr VS awesome-sharedtags

autorandr worked great for me for hot plugging when I would frequently use my laptop with two external monitors.

Autorandr does run in the background as it is a daemon. For systemd integration see https://github.com/phillipberndt/autorandr/blob/master/contrib/systemd/autorandr.service

I achieve this with autorandr. Never tried to implement inside (any) window manager.

autorandr (link) (xorg)

Check autorand. You can save profiles and automatically load them if an hdmi connection/disconnection is detected.

First setup all the display configurations, ignoring xmobar. Using something like https://github.com/phillipberndt/autorandr and https://christian.amsuess.com/tools/arandr/ make it easy. Now all you have to do is somehow invoke autorandr --change every time there's a connection or disconnection event.

If I may suggest, take a look at autorandr [1], it saves your monitor configuration and automatically enables it when a set of monitor is detected. It's a small thing, but it improves the experience and will replace your home alias.

[1] https://github.com/phillipberndt/autorandr

I personally use autorandr and set the wallpaper using feh within each config (in the postswitch script DO NOT SET IT IN i3). You can read more about getting it configured here.

I have an issue with using charitable / sharedtags and rules, The issue is that when I spawn an application/client that has rules, while the workspace/tag it is supposed to spawn on is visible on another screen but not focused, awesome freezes/crashes.

You can have a look at the shared tags modules that implement a way to share tags across multiple screen : https://github.com/Drauthius/awesome-sharedtags