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plochner Author

Level 1

79 points

Multi Monitor and Sierra Forgets Window Positions after Wake Up From Sleep

I have a laptop screen and an external monitor. Both are open during my workday. I keep my email and Messages app on my laptop screen and use the 27" monitor as my primary display for everything else. It's basically a multi-monitor setup except my laptop screen is the second monitor.

About once a day, when I leave my Macbook Pro Retina for 30 minutes and it goes to sleep, I wake it up from sleep and all of my windows are moved to my 27" display. I have to drag my email and Messages app back over to the laptop display.

Unless I physically disconnected my monitor, this absolutely never happened in El Capitan or Yosemite and even Mavericks. Every time I work up my Macbook from sleep it would remember where the windows need to be.

Why is this happening with Sierra?

Posted on Nov 1, 2016 2:23 PM

Top-ranking reply

NicJS

Level 1

9 points

Posted on Sep 26, 2017 11:13 AM

I had this problem this morning.

First you need to open Mission Control and add a new "Spaces" now just called a "Desktops" to both screens. You don't need to use these new Desktops, they just need to be there. With two monitors you end up with "Desktop 1" and "Desktop 2" on the first monitor and "Desktop 3" and Desktop 4" on the second monitor.

Right click the Dock Icon for that application you want to launch in the second screen and choose Option. Now you can assign the Application to always open on the second Desktop.

Without having multiple Desktops established, this option isn't available. It looks like a bug to me.

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33 replies

Xavier35

Level 1

4 points

Oct 8, 2017 9:21 AM in response to laden.m

I'm on a Mac Pro 2010 with 20 GB of RAM, 24" SpectraView 241 monitor (and an old Apple Studio Display for panels and secondary stuff). So not as supercharged as yours.

But, I am still resisting monthly Adobe payments, sticking with Photoshop CS6.

The drawback is that I need to use Adobe DNG converter to read most recent RAW files 😠

laden.m

Level 1

10 points

Oct 9, 2017 12:41 AM in response to plochner

another Sierra monitor management bug:

With multiple Desctops, Alt+Tab doesn't move to the dedicated App Desktop if the app is assigned to Desktop 2.

Alt+Tab moves to the First Desktop if an App is assigned to Desktop 1.

In El Capitan this worked.

MCinPDX

Level 1

9 points

Oct 10, 2017 7:17 AM in response to plochner

+1.

15" MBP 2017 with two Samsung LU28E590DS/ZA monitors that are connected directly to my MBP's TB ports. Nearly half of the time I wake my computer back up, the Desktops are moved between the two displays and my MBP's display. So for instance, I have the Left Monitor setup as Desktop 1, the Right Monitor as Desktop 2 and my MBP's Display setup as Desktop 3. When I wake the computer, all windows that were on Desktop 3 are now on my Right Monitor, all windows that were on Desktop 1 are now on my Left Monitor and all of my windows that were on my Desktop 2 are on my MBP (so 3-->1, 1-->2 and 2-->3). But sometimes it'll go 3-->1, 1-->3 and 2 will be fine). I had TB Monitors before this and NEVER had this issue. INCREDIBLY frustrating. Is there a fix yet?

In Mission Control, I do have "Displays have separate Spaces" checked.

This is clearly a bug and needs to be fixed--but I don't have faith that Apple will fix this, as folks that use more than one external monitors are an incredibly minority in the Apple ecosystem relative to iOS, single external monitor users and no external monitor users. Sadly I don't see this being fixed.

I would be down to write a script for this, though, as Xavier35 did. Maybe I'll hire someone on UpWork to do that for me and I'll post it here.

plochner Author

Level 1

79 points

Oct 10, 2017 9:15 AM in response to MCinPDX

It's been over a year since my post and High Sierra also has this problem. Much like several other long standing issues (mouse wheel acceleration comes to mind), I doubt this will ever be fixed by Apple.

Apple doesn't bother to check these forums, so unfortunately unless someone has a direct line to a OSX software engineer, we can complain about it but nothing will get done.

laden.m

Level 1

10 points

Oct 20, 2017 1:27 AM in response to plochner

Yesterday I talked with Apple Support. The guy told me that they know about the issues with the Dual Monitors and it should be listed as a bug. But he didn't sound confident and it doesn't seem that they are rushing to solve the issue.😠 He also couldn't tell me if they are working on solution only for High Sierra or also for Sierra.

He just told me to wait for an update and see if it gets better with further releases😕

Nov 7, 2017 2:27 PM in response to plochner

Same issue here.

Mac Book Pro 2017 15inch with Sierra 10.12.6

Dual monitor HP Z27s 4k.

EVERY TIME I unplugged monitors and plug in again at the same ports - all windows are messed up their positions.

This is really really annoying and drives me crazy.

Kyzya

Level 1

4 points

Nov 18, 2017 8:36 AM in response to plochner

I can't believe that, more than one year later there is no solution to this problem. For me is the most annoying issue since I upgraded to Sierra and I really need a solution. I tried with an app called Display maid but it does not work properly.

jd2020

Level 1

67 points

Dec 14, 2017 1:14 PM in response to NicJS

Thanks for this workaround. I didn't have this problem on El Cap' or Sierra. It seems to have started for me with 10.13.2! Apple's code quality is trending downward for more than a year now. <sigh>

Dec 7, 2016 8:41 AM in response to plochner

I'm having a similar issue, although in reverse. Mine occurs when locking and unlocking the display or when energy saver turns the display off. The laptop is configured to turn the display off after 15 minutes and"[x] prevent computer from sleeping automatically when the display is off."

I'm using two external 23" monitors over HDMI via two USBC Digital AV Multiport Adapters driven from my 2016 MBP 15".

All the windows on the external displays relocate back to the laptop display when this happens. After the display(s) are back on, I have to painstakingly relocate the windows back to where they were before the display went off--somewhat of a hassle.

There's probably a way to manually save the window locations using some sort of "snapshot" command and restore that, but on my previous 2011 MBP this was not an issue--windows stayed were they were so long as the multiple monitor configuration didn't physically change.

plochner Author

Level 1

79 points

Dec 7, 2016 8:53 AM in response to ACGarland

I have just learned to live with it. Sierra has several buggy things like this which the average user doesn't notice, and I think Sierra so far has been a step down from Yosemite and El Cap. At work I made a big push to get everyone upgraded to El Cap but I won't be making that push for Sierra. Just too many goofy behavior things like this multi monitor issue that sadly I don't think will ever be fixed. I have been to the Genius bar with all of these below problems and have gotten basically a shrug from the guys there - nothing against them, but since they had no idea how to fix these issues even after I replicated it for them, it's obviously something inherit in the OS that nobody knows how to fix.

Here's a short list of some other issues I have:

Sierra is confused about active directory passwords and desperately wants your AD password to be the same as your iCloud password. I am asked every morning to "continue to change my iCloud password" so it matches my AD password, something I will never do.
Funny enough, any changes to my iCloud preferences pane requires the usual "type your password to continue" - and absolutely none of my passwords work in that box.
Mouse scroll wheel acceleration is a disaster with no way to find a happy medium between the scroll speed on your trackpad vs the scroll speed on your mouse wheel. Even with a Mighty Mouse it's not the same.
Siri on the Mac in a work environment is massively impractical unless everyone closes their door and has their own office. All of our Sierra users in the office have tried Siri and absolutely none of them use her in their day to day.
Window focus switching is goofy. I'll be in Photoshop, open a Finder window to drag a new picture into Photoshop, just to find that Photoshop suddenly jumps to the front as soon as I start dragging the files, obscuring my new Finder window. This happens regularly in several apps both Apple and 3rd party.

plochner Author

Level 1

79 points

Dec 7, 2016 9:28 AM in response to plochner

As far as the Genius bar's handling of my issues, their standard approach is to "Create a new user and let's see if that continues to happen" but that is not practical in an enterprise bound Active Directory environment, because your computer account is tied into your AD account. As soon as you start talking anything enterprise with them, they won't be able to help you much, it's just not their forte and sadly there isn't any other support option. Our Business Store and Joint Venture contacts are helpful and sympathetic, but in the end they're sales guys, not hardcore apple enterprise technical support engineers.

I've always thought that solution was a bit of a cop out because they're basically saying "I don't know what it is so lets start with a fresh set of preference files and see if the problem occurs again" instead of "We've identified the problem and it's with these system files, so let's fix those instead of starting over 100% fresh."