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Dual Monitors help

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Brettskie
Posts: 2
Joined: December 1st, 2009, 4:31 am

Dual Monitors help

Post by Brettskie »

I have two monitors, I want to put the meter on my extended monitor, but when I hit refresh all it goes back to my main monitor. I have checked "stay in position" no matter what it will go to my main monitor if i do anything. Main monitor is a 22 inch, and my extended is a 17in westing house. Now if I set my 17 as my main display it will work fine.
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jsmorley
Developer
Posts: 22628
Joined: April 19th, 2009, 11:02 pm
Location: Fort Hunt, Virginia, USA

Re: Dual Monitors help

Post by jsmorley »

Brettskie wrote:I have two monitors, I want to put the meter on my extended monitor, but when I hit refresh all it goes back to my main monitor. I have checked "stay in position" no matter what it will go to my main monitor if i do anything. Main monitor is a 22 inch, and my extended is a 17in westing house. Now if I set my 17 as my main display it will work fine.
Load the skin.
Open RainBrowser
Click on the skin in the list at the bottom left and click "Skin Settings"
Change the value of WindowX to:

0@2

Then click "Apply" and "Exit".

Exit RainBrowser

Now the skin will be on the left of your second monitor. You can drag it anywhere on the monitor and refresh as you like and it will stay there.
Brettskie
Posts: 2
Joined: December 1st, 2009, 4:31 am

Re: Dual Monitors help

Post by Brettskie »

That worked, Thanks alot man. Much appreciated.
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jsmorley
Developer
Posts: 22628
Joined: April 19th, 2009, 11:02 pm
Location: Fort Hunt, Virginia, USA

Re: Dual Monitors help

Post by jsmorley »

Brettskie wrote:That worked, Thanks alot man. Much appreciated.
You are welcome. I suspect you were running into an issue because you had your second monitor on the "left" of your primary. There is a problem with Rainmeter in the 1.1 Release version where it will not accept/maintain negative numbers in WindowX. So if you just drag a skin to a second monitor on the left of the primary it would put it there, putting "WindowX=-1024". (for instance) However on the next refresh Rainmeter would come off the rails over the negative number and set it back to some positive number which would have the effect of tossing the skin back on the primary monitor.

This is because Rainmeter by default treats two monitors as one big monitor for positioning purposes. So if you have a two monitors of 1024x768, Rainmeter sees one really large 2048x768 screen. However it sees the "primary" (monitor 1 in Windows) as the "starting point". If you drag a skin over to a secondary monitor on the right, it sees the skin as being on your primary monitor, but at a large (say 1400 for instance) WindowX position. This is fine when your secondary monitor is on the right, but when it is on the left it means moving a skin there confuses Rainmeter into thinking you have moved the skin off the primary monitor into a negative WindowX value. This makes it behave a lot like the folks in 1492 who assumed Columbus would sail off the edge of the world. It refuses to sail with you.

This issue has been resolved in a fix which will be available soon in a Rainmeter 1.2 beta. However in the meantime you can take advantage of a feature of Rainmeter to "force" a skin on to a particular monitor by putting "@x" after the WindowX or WindowY setting in Rainmter.ini.

So in my example, if your second monitor is 1024x768 then WindowX=0@2 is the same as WindowX=-1024 and all is well.

It should be noted that in ANY case it is a better practice to use the "@x" approach when you want to permanently put a skin on a particular monitor other than the default/primary. It is fine if you are just dragging a skin over there temporarily for some reason, but if you want a skin to live on a particular monitor it is best to use RainBrowser (or just edit Rainmeter.ini) and set the monitor the skin should stay on.

This is because if you just drag skins to a secondary monitor and Rainmeter sets "WindowX=1400" (again an example) that's fine until you change the resolution on your primary monitor for some reason. Now "1400" mean something completely different in the world of "Hey, it's one big monitor", and your skin on the secondary monitor is going to move when you almost certainly didn't mean/want it to. Setting "WindowX=376@2" for the skin, which in our example is the same as "WindowX=1400" will tell Rainmeter exactly where you want it and it won't react to resolution changes on the primary monitor.

Additional note: A lot of folks use an application called "Display Fusion" to help manage multiple monitors. This is a nice little app. The free version is primarily to help "span" wallpapers across two or more monitors. (by default Windows will just put a full copy of the same one on each monitor) Rainmeter apparently has some issues with this app. In particular, using !RainmeterToggle while Display Fusion is running will cause skins to move to a secondary monitor for no apparent reason. What I recommend is that you run Display Fusion, set your wallpaper as desired, then exit Display Fusion. It does not need to be kept "running" to maintain the wallpaper setup you define. This will not noly reduce issues with Rainmeter, but will save you a fair amount of RAM memory you may not really need to use.
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