Jeff
Jeff Cloud Systems Architect
1 min read / TL;DR

MAC Dual Displays Switch Places

MAC Dual Displays Switch Places

If you are using Dual Monitors with an Apple Macbook, you may encounter an issue where the displays swap or flip when the computer goes to sleep. My dual monitor setup would randomly switch which display was the left and right, requiring me to go into the displays menu and swap them back. This is very annoying. Luckily, there is a quick fix for this

Open Mission Control by clicking on the Apple Logo, system preferences and search for mission control

Preferences Mission Control

Or press CMD+SPACE and type mission control

Uncheck the box next to "Automatically rearrange spaces based on the most recent use" option. MAC OS treats each monitor as a "space", and gets wonky when it tries to rearrange spaces on external monitors. In my experience, this only appears to happen when both monitors are the same make and model.

Preferences

Navigate to

  1. System Preferences
  2. Mission Control
  3. Uncheck "Automatically rearrange spaces based on the most recent use"

Alternative Fix

If the above fix does not fix your display layout on mac, the following script will easily flip the displays back.

Install displayplacer

brew tap jakehilborn/jakehilborn && brew install displayplacer

Run displayplacer and save the output as a script to run later

displayplacer list