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0 pointsjeroenhd1mo ago0 comments

Window management isn't macOS' strong suit, but external monitors make it act absolutely crazy. Connecting monitors will do anything from keeping all windows in the same position to restoring previous positions to launching them across screens, sometimes completely outside visible screen space, seemingly arbitrarily.

I get why Apple wants you to make every window either a small tile or a full screen application now, their window manager simply can't cope with anything else.

Whatever they're doing is somehow worse than both Windows and the major Linux desktop environments. Maybe there's some obscure preference among old school macOS users that like having their windows placed so that only a small corner pokes out of the bottom left when attaching an external monitor?

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sensanaty1mo ago

On the topic of multi monitor messiness, NOTHING gets my blood boiling quite like the taskbar (or whatever it's called, the bottom application drawer) moving between monitors, seemingly arbitrarily

Keep your cursor hovered over the bottom of the 2nd monitor? It moves. Want to move it back? I have tried everything I could think of to try get it back, I still to this day after 5 years of being on Mac because work forces it on me cannot see the logic or heuristic it chooses for when to move the fucking dock. I swear it's basically random, and it's a daily occurrence for me that I have to just shake my cursor violently to get the stupid thing to eventually move.

The worst part is you can't even disable this dumbass behavior! You can't tell it "Hey, dock should ONLY be on monitor 1", so you just have to live with this anti feature

jeroenhdOP1mo ago

As far as I can tell, the dock appears on either the left/rightmost display (when docked to the side) or on the main display.

What is the "main display"? You can find out by going to settings > displays, where you find a "use as" dropdown that can be set to "mirror", "main display", or "extended display". If you want to move the dock, change the main display. This also affects a few other, smaller things.

I personally put the dock to the side so it doesn't take up precious space (windows don't seem to want to cover the dock if it's at the bottom, even with the setting for that disabled).

pixelesque1mo ago

I remember early OS X (10.4 / 10.5? - damn, that was 20 years ago?!) with a laptop and external monitor.

It was farcical, as the menu bar was always only on the primary monitor, so you had to use/click menus on that monitor, even if the actual window the menu was for was on the other monitor.

Around 10.7 or so they started putting menus on both monitors at the same time to at least make this scenario a bit more sane.

jakub_g1mo ago

Oh, the Dock. Try to have a setup where you have two displays vertically, BUT you want the Toolbar and Dock both be on the top one, stably - impossible.

Workaround I found: you can configure the monitors to be a pattern like this instead:

   1
     2

touching only in the corner. Then it works, the Dock is on monitor 1.

sheept1mo ago

It seems to be a common issue, and despite googling I wasn't able to find a solution that worked (back in Aug '25). For some reason, it does not happen if you position the dock on the left/right side rather than the bottom

skydhash1mo ago

If your monitors are arranged horizontally, you just need to touch the bottom part of the screen you want the dock to be on (I set mine to autohide). If they are arranged vertically, it's best to have them in zigzag or put the dock to the sides, not the bottom.

It's infuriating, which is why I prefer to use spotlight (actually Alfred) or the app switcher.

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