A row-major index over the flat Vec turns COSMIC's workspace strip into a wrapping 5x5 grid

Four fingers up, and cosmic-comp's input path turns the direction into a delta on the flat Vec: minus cols for up, minus one for left, with each axis wrapping on its own ^[8]. The natural-scroll convention is preserved exactly, so up/down muscle memory carries over and left/right is additive ^[8]. The new index goes out through `set_workspace_coordinates`, which emits the ext-workspace protocol `Coordinates` event ^[6]. cctk surfaces that as `WorkspaceInfo.coordinates`, and cosmic-workspaces draws from it ^[6]. According to the post, that pipeline is already 2D in stock cosmic-comp, and the grid only changes how the coordinates are computed and rendered ^[6].

The first commit did not finish the job. dbe7678 added the mode with 319 insertions and 28 deletions across six files, 137 of them in `src/input/actions.rs` ^[13]. A second commit, 54f7719, animates swipes along the gesture axis instead of the layout axis: 67 insertions, 22 deletions, four files, one of them `src/shell/focus/order.rs` ^[14].

The layout claim in the post is that "no workspace is ever more than two gestures away" ^[19]. On a wrapping row of five cells with the cursor at index 2, the farthest cell is two steps away ^[22]. One swipe moves one axis, and both axes can be two off at once, so the corner cells sit four swipes from the center ^[23].

The post calls the compositor change "roughly 432 lines of Rust" ^[15]. That figure is insertions plus deletions, 384 and 48 ^[20]. Added code across the two repositories comes to 519 lines, counting the 135 insertions in cosmic-workspaces' `src/view/mod.rs` ^[27]. The post does not give line counts for the follow-up commit that fixed the sidebar build ^[16].

`install.sh` archives the stock binaries before it writes anything: 27.3 MB of cosmic-comp and 30.2 MB of cosmic-workspaces, 57.5 MB sitting in `stock/` ^[12][21]. It then runs `apt-mark hold` on both packages so a system update cannot silently overwrite the patched binaries, and `rollback.sh` restores the originals and releases the holds ^[11]. The overview app is coupled to the patched compositor crate: its `Cargo.toml` carries a `[patch."https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp"]` section ^[17].

The developer wrote that "The intellectual core of the patch is that a grid is a row-major mapping, not a workspace-model rewrite" ^[18]. I would take that trade on a compositor I had to keep running. Workspaces are still created on demand and removed when empty, so memory behavior matches stock ^[10].