Configure and switch macOS displays with Displayplacer

Chris Chinchilla
Mac O’Clock
Published in
5 min readOct 5, 2023

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A Chinchilla looking at multiple screens, generated with help of Midjourney

I am extremely lucky to have a display problem. I have a small home office and a studio setup. At home, I sometimes have my laptop under my screen and sometimes to the left. In the studio, I have two external screens, one of which I switch to 1080p when recording videos. So that’s four potential screen configurations. I have always found screen configuration on macOS relatively smart and reliable. It tends to remember individual screens and automatically switch to the configuration you last used with that screen. But if you want to manually change layouts or resolutions, what do you do? You can keep jumping into system settings to make changes, but that gets tedious quickly. I wondered if there was a better way.

Video version

I also have a video version of this post showing full commands, setup, and how to switch profiles.

Introducing Displayplacer

Displayplacer, available on GitHub, is an xrandr alternative for macOS that enables switching between different screen configuration presets…

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Chris Chinchilla
Mac O’Clock

Writer, podcaster, and video maker covering technology, the creative process, board and roleplay game development, fiction, and even more.