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dual monitor management heaven

Posted by Ricardo Kirkner on

For some time now I have been struggling to find a non-brain-dead way of managing my dual-monitor setup.

I have a laptop and an external monitor, and while it's fairly easy to configure X to extend the virtual desktop across both (using the nvidia-settings tool, as the proprietary drivers don't cope well with the standard monitor management tool in Ubuntu), it was always a hassle when you need to disconnect your laptop and move away from your desktop; most of your windows would remain hidden from view in the "other" monitor, and you had to resort to hacky ways of letting X know: "I now have just 1 monitor so please adjust my settings".

Today I found a very nice tool that handles this problem very well: autorandr, you just made it to the list of my favorite tools.

autorandr lets you save a given screen configuration into a profile which can be enabled/disabled on demand. It uses disper or xrandr underneath to do the dirty work of configuring your monitors/screens.

What I did was basically:

1. Configure my screens as I have them usually at home (external monitor
   is primary screen + laptop extends to the right)

disper -d CRT-0,DFP-0 -r 1680x1050,1440x900 -e -t right

2. Save that configuration as a profile called "dual"

auto-disper --save dual

3. Configure my screens so that the laptop is the only available monitor

disper -d DFP-0 -r 1440x900 -s

4. Save that configuration as a profile called "laptop" (I disconnected
   my external monitor to make sure the tool only sees the laptop monitor)

auto-disper --save laptop

5. Bound the "auto-disper --change" command to a key so that when I
   unplug the external monitor I can just run that and auto-disper will
   adjust the screen configuration to match the the hardware profile.

Now, whenever I plug the external monitor in or out I can just hit that key combination and my screens will get correctly configured!

Easy! :)

What I'd like to figure out next is how to have the tool automatically detect such events (external monitor plug in/out) and run the auto-disper command automatically.

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