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Most users of my Lunar app (https://lunar.fyi) that were coming from Windows, have been praising the Windows multi monitor experience while the Mac felt limited in the handling of external monitors.
I admit that finding a way to change monitor brightness [1] or turn off individual displays [2] wasn’t as straightforward and needed a lot of reverse engineering. But macOS has a much nicer API [3] for configuring screen position, resolution, mirroring etc.
It’s not without its quirks however, I ran into a lot of bugs while developing the Blackout feature when having to create multiple mirror sets with multiple displays in each one. I finally had to reverse engineer the MonitorPanel.framework that’s used by System Preferences to get that functionality. [4]
From my understanding, Windows has a native way of disabling a display in software so this wouldn’t even be needed there.
[1] https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/journey-to-ddc-on-m1-macs/
[2] https://lunar.fyi/#blackout
[3] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coregraphics/quart...
[4] https://github.com/alin23/monitorpanel
Most users of my Lunar app (https://lunar.fyi) that were coming from Windows, have been praising the Windows multi monitor experience while the Mac felt limited in the handling of external monitors.
I admit that finding a way to change monitor brightness [1] or turn off individual displays [2] wasn’t as straightforward and needed a lot of reverse engineering. But macOS has a much nicer API [3] for configuring screen position, resolution, mirroring etc.
It’s not without its quirks however, I ran into a lot of bugs while developing the Blackout feature when having to create multiple mirror sets with multiple displays in each one. I finally had to reverse engineer the MonitorPanel.framework that’s used by System Preferences to get that functionality. [4]
From my understanding, Windows has a native way of disabling a display in software so this wouldn’t even be needed there.
[1] https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/journey-to-ddc-on-m1-macs/
[2] https://lunar.fyi/#blackout
[3] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coregraphics/quart...
[4] https://github.com/alin23/monitorpanel
I thought ChangeDisplaySettingsEx and EnumDisplaySettings was superseded by SetDisplayConfig and QueryDisplayConfig, respectively? https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/windows-driver-docs/blob/st... calls ChangeDisplaySettingsEx "legacy API".
From my experience, changing topology using SetDisplayConfig() is straightforward.
I wrote an F# tool specifically for changing the primary display not too long ago. This is the code that calls the Win32 API to query the displays and set the primary one.
https://github.com/steinuil/SatouinDp/blob/master/DisplayDev...
One thing I never figured out was how to map the displays you get from EnumDisplayDevices to the names you see in the display settings, or how to list them in a consistent order.