Changing the primary display using the Win32 API

Re:Changing the primary display using the Win32 API by alin23 on Sunday June 12, 2022 @08:27AM (#31713973)

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

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Re:Changing the primary display using the Win32 API by Scene_Cast2 on Sunday June 12, 2022 @09:55AM (#31714528)

Your comment makes it sound like Lunar app has Windows builds, but the website implies that it's Mac only. Could you clarify?

I'm currently running Windows, and I'd love to check out Lunar if it's available.

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Re:Changing the primary display using the Win32 API by alin23 on Sunday June 12, 2022 @10:23AM (#31714715)

It is macOS only, sorry if I wasn’t clear on that. I was talking about the “Lunar users that were coming from Windows” so I thought it implies that Lunar isn’t for Windows.

You can get TwinkleTray for Windows that can do most of what Lunar does: https://twinkletray.com/

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