By the way, if you are not aware of the feature called Mac Spaces, you should seriously check it out. Great feature to give you ample desktop spaces and improve your efficiency by staying organized!
Just remember to disable auto arrange from within system preferences - mission control. You can also easily access your spaces using keyboard shortcut COMMAND+UP.
So why do I need so many screens and desktops? For one, with my ever diminishing eyesight, I needed all the fonts in my various app windows to be bigger, which requires more screen real estates. Also, with multiple virtual desktops, I can group apps/windows together for various categories. For example, all apps/windows related to my blogs would stay on the same virtual desktop, and all the articles I want to read later can stay on the same virtual desktop.
However, whenever my laptop auto locks or goes to sleep mode due to inactivity, or when I unplug my external monitors to go to meetings or go home, all my open app windows get moved to the laptop screen and stay there even when I wake up the computer or plug my external monitors back in. Now I have to manually move all the open apps/windows back to their respective virtual desktops onto the right monitor screen to the old location. This is super annoying!!!
I guess Apple engineers (or really the product managers) have simply decided that this feature (putting open windows back to their original positions) is low priority despite the fact that many users craved for such capabilities for more than 10 years.
One feature MacOS (Mojave) has is to be able to assign an application to a specific desktop. That way, the app will always open on that desktop. But that doesn't address the case where I want one Chrome window to open in desktop one and another Chrome window to open in desktop two.
Well, look no further. I have finally found the solution(s).
First solution is an app called Stay made by Cordless Dog. It does exactly that: Keeps windows in their place. The app has a price tag of $15 and offers a 30 day trial period so you can give it a free run.
When you plug in your external monitors (or wake up your computer), the app automatically detects the event and then moves most of the windows back to their original locations most of the times. So why not all the time? My guess is that the programmer of the app didn't expect a user to have that many apps open on that many desktops. Anyway, the big plus for Stay is that it can handle multiple virtual desktops.
There is only one downside for me with Stay: when I go home to my 2 external monitors setup instead of the 3 external monitors setup at work, Stay freaks out and all my open apps are all over the place again.
Luckily, I found a second solution, an app called Moom made by Many Tricks.
This app costs $10 and comes with a free demo mode where you can try things for 100 times. The nice things about this app are:
- It allows you to save different screen layouts. So I could have one layout for my 3-monitor setup and another layout for my 2-monitor setup.
- It also detects how many displays you have and then trigger different layouts accordingly. Now as soon as I plug in my external monitors, the app will put all the windows to the positions and desktops I want them whether I am at home or at work! Wow!!
- And it is $5 cheaper! Can't complain on that! 😜
Paid my $10 and got the app configured the way I want! I am a happy camper!! But wait, this app also had glitches. Guess developers for this app didn't expect a user like me who uses 28 screens simultaneously. The good news is that the developers are actually well on top of things. As soon as I created bug tickets with them, they responded the same day. Hopefully they can quickly get the issues addressed in the next minor release of the app.
So anyway, my vote is on Moom, option two. But choose the one that works the best for you. According to other people who tried to solve the same problem, some other options are:
Moving on to my next daily battle!! See ya!
BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com
yeah, I don't like it when you have so many tabs open it makes my ocd go crazyy!
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