Keep on screen?

[Kolano]

I'm confused about the "Keep on screen" setting. Does that mean "Keep on the screen the skin is initially assigned to" or "Keep on a visible screen"?

Regardless of which way I twiddle things, my widgets jump all over the place each time I power off/on any of my three monitors. I think part of the problem may be things failing to respect Windows "Scale and layout" > 100% appropriately, as I frequently have to drag around widgets to get them to size correctly, but that seems to fail to explain the seemingly random and frequently off-screen locations things get moved to (i.e. off-screen of all three monitors after powering them back on, regardless of "Keep on screen" being selected or not).

I love the functionality of Rainmeter, but I'm really growing tired of needing to...

• Open Manage skin on some visible widget

• Select each missing widget

• Manually reset each's coordinates to appear on screen

• Manually reset each to it's appropriate position

• Manually wiggle onscreen widgets to get them to scale appropriately

• Move them to be positioned appropriately

...every time I power monitors on and off.

The tool to reload specific Rainmeter layouts when detecting different number of monitors was also failing for me. I think due to each of the three monitors powering on in different orders confusing the transition from 1 > 2 >3, though perhaps I didn't fight with it enough.

Would very much appreciate advice on resolving this situation, and hope that future version of Rainmeter might handle it better.

[SilverAzide]

Would very much appreciate advice on resolving this situation, and hope that future version of Rainmeter might handle it better.

So have you tried any of the positioning settings? In other words, right-click a skin, then from the context menu select Settings > Position. From here, you can set the skin to appear on specific monitors or (most importantly) select whether the skin is positioned relative to the left or right side of the screen. You might have inadvertently forced the skin to a monitor that doesn't exist or something (when powering monitors off and on, your desktop changes size and your skins might be trying to compensate for it).

You can also use a utility like RainRez (or create an invisible "layout switcher" skin that does the same thing) that watches for changes to your desktop and autoloads specific layouts depending on certain desktop resolutions.

[Yincognito]

Alternatively for what SilverAzide mentioned, you can check your Rainmeter.ini and make sure the skins' WindowX and WindowY (and optionally AnchorX and AnchorY, if needed) are set to the specific monitor where you want them. See the end of the WindowX / WindowY description at:
https://docs.rainmeter.net/manual/settings/skin-sections/

If those coordinates are set properly, the jumping on another monitor should normally not happen...

At worst, placing skins on your 1, 2, 3 monitors might be swapped due to a different powering on order, but that would be a detail not affecting the typical positioning in a significant manner.

[Kolano]

Thanks for the feedback.

Reviewing the "Position" menu I can confirm the widgets are assigned to specific monitors. Part of the problem with things moving around does seem related to some being set to "On desktop" rather than "Normal". Setting them to Normal has at least kept them on their related monitors for a couple power cycles. Though another part of the problem may also be that I have multiple monitors that are both identified as "Generic PnP Monitor", so perhaps it's unclear which is which as they cycle.

Unfortunately I still have issues with the widgets not respecting the monitor's "Scale and layout" settings post power cycles. But I guess wiggling widgets is less work than I formerly had to go through.