Dual monitor users .. mid 2011 Mac Mini

[monty77]

Just bought the MM with a pair of Dell U2412s .. having some fun and games making the most of them though.

The MM shares both displays with a Thinkpad T410 so I need a quick way of enabling/disabling the 2nd display on the MM, preferably with a keyboard shortcut. In Windows world I use Win+P to switch in/out of presentation mode - is there an alternative in OSX? I've tried Command F1 but that just messes up the resolution on one of the monitors (1 is portrait, 1 is landscape). Also is there a quicker way of switching the primary desktop than having to go via the preferences panel?

Is there an App out there that enables me to arrange my apps properly too? Or at least have it remember where stuff was when I switch between modes?

Thanks!!
Adam

 

[brucewayne]

I'm not exactly sure, but it sounds like you want to switch the monitors in a way where you can display PC/PC or PC/Mac or Mac/PC or Mac/Mac, which is complicated by having one monitor in landscape and the other in portrait, as well as in mixed PC/MAC mode you want both monitors to display the 'primary' display.

In my experience Windows and OSX handle multiple monitors very differently.

On Windows in presentation (mirror) mode you can preserve full resolution on a 1920x1080 primary monitor while scaling to a projector that is 1024x768.

OSX always tries to 1:1 pixel map between monitors when mirroring. So in your case (identical monitors, but one landscape and one portrait) when you activate mirroring via system preferences or CMD-F1, OSX will try to find a resolution that will work at 1200x1920 and 1920x1200 at the same time. I'm not aware of any way to change this behavior.

Also not aware of a native shortcut to switch primary displays. If you google 'OSX primary display shortcut', you get a some hits for scripts people have written, but most of them seem to be more work than the standard way.

There is a app called SecondBar http://blog.boastr.net/?page_id=79 that allows you to have a menu bar on both displays. This might help if you switch to mixed PC/Mac mode and the 'primary' display is not the one you are viewing.

 

[monty77]

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

It's a bit fragmented it would seem so basically I've chosen one monitor to be the Mac primary and one to be the Windows primary. This way the other monitor for each setup is the projector (as Windows calls it) or secondary display.

Using SwitchresX I created two 'sets' that are mapped to shortcut keys (F5/F6 in my case as they were going spare) .. one disables the 2nd monitor, one enables it again. In Windows world I can just use Windows+P shortcut to switch between Extend and Projector only.

Works like a charm!

Cheers,
Adam

I'm not exactly sure, but it sounds like you want to switch the monitors in a way where you can display PC/PC or PC/Mac or Mac/PC or Mac/Mac, which is complicated by having one monitor in landscape and the other in portrait, as well as in mixed PC/MAC mode you want both monitors to display the 'primary' display.

In my experience Windows and OSX handle multiple monitors very differently.

On Windows in presentation (mirror) mode you can preserve full resolution on a 1920x1080 primary monitor while scaling to a projector that is 1024x768.

OSX always tries to 1:1 pixel map between monitors when mirroring. So in your case (identical monitors, but one landscape and one portrait) when you activate mirroring via system preferences or CMD-F1, OSX will try to find a resolution that will work at 1200x1920 and 1920x1200 at the same time. I'm not aware of any way to change this behavior.

Also not aware of a native shortcut to switch primary displays. If you google 'OSX primary display shortcut', you get a some hits for scripts people have written, but most of them seem to be more work than the standard way.

There is a app called SecondBar http://blog.boastr.net/?page_id=79 that allows you to have a menu bar on both displays. This might help if you switch to mixed PC/Mac mode and the 'primary' display is not the one you are viewing.