Menubars and extended displays

Viro

Viro

Registered
I'm currently trying out the extended display capability of my Powerbook by connecting an external monitor to it. It looks nice so far and I have more or less doubled my work area with the extra monitor.

The only problem I'm facing at the moment is that if I move an app to the 2nd monitor, the menubar still appears in my primary monitor (i.e. the LCD display of the laptop). This makes working with apps on the secondary monitor difficult, since I need to move the mouse back to the main monitor to get to teh menu bar.

Is there a way to get hte menu bar to appear on the secondary monitor?
 
The menu bar stays in the primary display. You can actually change that by opening the Displays pref pane in System Preferences, then dragging the picture of the menu bar over to the other display, but then you just have this same problem in reverse - the menu bar would be on the 2nd monitor and not show up on the LCD display.

So far as I know, there's no way to dynamically change this.
 
Whoa, my friend, I don't think you've worked with multiple monitors long enough! Try this instead: open up your favorite graphics application, and move the toolbars to the second monitor. That way, your entire main desktop is free for the image display, and the tools are readily accessible only a few inches away.

Or, if you write code, you can have twice as many windows open without having to switch between them -- believe me, this is very useful.

Or, you can watch a full-screen DVD on one monitor and have Mail and iCal and Konfabulator and Safari open in the second monitor, chugging away.

While I agree that having the toolbar on the second monitor as well would be helpful in a limited number of situations, the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks. Remember: you don't have to have a side-by-side display. If you had one on top of the other, it would be like your main monitor was stretched to be twice as high -- would you want a second menubar in the middle of that space?

I suggest giving it a few days and see how you adjust to it. Try moving some lesser-used applications or infrequently used applications that you'd still like to check on every once in a while to the second monitor, like Mail and iCal. Open two Safari windows side-by-side, or three, if you've got room. Edit 4 text files at once (it's possible now, and very feasible since you can see all of them at once).

I'll tell ya, though, I'd take a good dual 17" setup over a single 21" monitor any day.
 
With code, I use JEdit, Matlab, Netbeans and these have tabs for working with multiple documents. I don't have multiple windows open and it's very very easy to switch between tabs without taking my hands off the keyboard. Putting them on the 2nd monitor just isn't going to be as ... productive.

I don't do much photo editing, but now that you mention the toolbars thingy, i can see how that might be useful for people who work with stuff like Photoshop.

But I'll give it a try for a few days. I've suddenly got this idea about putting all my X11 screens on the 2nd monitor and i'll see how that feels.
 
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