Display Affinity Software for MacOSX?

August 1, 2009 10:50 AM

Is there a piece of Mac OS X software which will let me divide a very wide screen up into several virtual displays so window/app affinity hacks like spaces will work?

I recently purchased two 24" HD displays, and I'm running them both from my Mac Book Pro via a Matrox Triple Head 2 Go, Digital version (Dual-link DVI)

I love having all of this real-estate - it's truly wonderful for programming.

The problem is that the Triple Head 2 Go makes both monitors present as one huge, wide display to the OS.

This means whenever any centered alerts pop up, they are right in the middle of this giant screen, and split by the bezels.

OK, so it's not the worst thing in the world, I just need to move the window to make it legible.

But, I was wondering if there's any third-party or shareware software out there that will allow me to tune the screen location affinity of apps or windows or alerts.

The real solution to this, I know, is to have a desktop machine with multiple display cards, but that's not happening at the moment.

posted by tomierna to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Check out some of the tiling window managers for OS X, I used xmonad with my 2 30" monitors and it does wonders. Stackoverflow posts on this here and here.
posted by zentrification at 10:58 AM on August 1

Note that xmonad, while great, will only with with X11 applications.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:21 AM on August 1

Doesn't the (included) PowerDesk software let you adjust where dialog boxes and applications show up?
posted by kcm at 11:51 AM on August 1

Take a look at sizeup. I still miss ion3.
posted by aeighty at 1:09 PM on August 1

Yeah, I'm with kcm - I thought the Matrox software (available for download here) was supposed to do exactly that.
posted by agentmunroe at 7:47 AM on August 2

Powerdesk on the Mac only allows you to change the Dock position to the Start, Middle or End, and gives you keypresses to move a selected window to a screen and resize it to fill. I'm looking for something with more granular control, and automatically for dialogs.

I believe Powerdesk on Windows has finer control.

Sizeup looks interesting, but not much more useful than what Powerdesk provides.

I'm looking at the other options listed on Stackoverflow now.
posted by tomierna at 1:45 PM on August 2

MercuryMover is looking promising for normal window management- I saw it listed at the links zentrification posted.

It still doesn't handle the dialog box problem, where open and save dialog boxes as well as alerts pop up in the middle. Sigh.

If FWM (Finder Window Manager) supported windows other than Finder windows, it might be useful to me.
posted by tomierna at 2:03 PM on August 3