Save your monitor arrangements as named profiles and switch between them from the system tray, a hotkey, or the command line. Installs properly, starts with Windows, and updates itself.
Windows 10 and 11. Project page
Two computers, one set of monitors. When the work machine comes on, the personal machine needs to release two of its three displays so the monitors switch over on their own; when work is done, it takes them back. Doing that through the Windows display settings every day is tedious, and the older tools that automate it have to be relaunched by hand after every reboot.
This does that in one click, and stays out of the way otherwise. The second computer needs nothing installed.
Download the installer from the latest release and run it. It installs per-user, so there is no administrator prompt, and it updates itself from then on.
The installer is not code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen will warn the first time. Choose More info then Run anyway. Two ways to avoid that:
- Unblock the file first — right-click the download, Properties, tick
Unblock. Or
Unblock-File .\ModernMonitorSwitcher_*_x64-setup.exe. - Or build and install from a checkout, which never involves a download at
all:
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File tools/install-local.ps1.
SmartScreen only inspects files carrying a Mark-of-the-Web, which is the NTFS stream a browser attaches to things it downloads. Either approach means there is no such stream, so nothing warns. Updates after the first install do not warn either: the updater writes its download directly rather than through a browser.
It installs per-user, into %LOCALAPPDATA%\ModernMonitorSwitcher, rather than
into Program Files. That is deliberate: a per-user install needs no
administrator rights, which means updates can install themselves without
putting a UAC prompt in your way every time. The cost is that it is installed
for one Windows account rather than the whole machine.
Arrange your monitors however you want them using the normal Windows display
settings, then open Modern Monitor Switcher and choose Save current layout.
Give it a name — Work and Play, say. Repeat for each arrangement.
The first time it opens, a short guide walks through this. Show guide in Settings brings it back.
Each profile is drawn as the monitors it turns on, so you can tell them apart at a glance. After that, switching is one click: on a profile in the window, or on its name in the tray menu. The ... button on a profile has rename, hotkey, replace and delete.
Displays shows what is on screen now and lets you name each monitor, so profiles read "Left, Middle" instead of model numbers. Identify puts each name on its screen.
Start with Windows is in Settings. Turn it on once and the application is simply always there.
Each profile can have a global hotkey. Choose Set hotkey from the profile's ... menu and press the combination you want. It needs at least one of Ctrl, Alt or Shift, so you cannot accidentally take over a bare letter system-wide.
msw.exe is installed alongside the application, at
%LOCALAPPDATA%\ModernMonitorSwitcher\msw.exe.
msw list List saved profiles
msw current Show what is on screen now
msw save "Work" Save the current layout
msw apply "Work" Switch to a profile
msw apply "Work" --dry-run Check it would work, change nothing
msw delete "Work"
msw rename "Work" "Office"
msw monitors-off Switch every monitor off
msw reset Restore the layout Windows remembers
For a Stream Deck button, use the System → Open action with:
"%LOCALAPPDATA%\ModernMonitorSwitcher\msw.exe" apply "Work"
The command line works whether or not the tray application is running — it talks to Windows directly, not to the app.
The displays end up somewhere unusable. Run msw reset, or use Restore the
Windows layout under Troubleshooting in Settings. That asks Windows to restore its own
remembered arrangement for whatever monitors are currently connected. If you
cannot see anything at all, Windows reverts an unconfirmed display change after
about 15 seconds on its own; failing that, boot into safe mode.
A profile will not apply. Run msw apply "Name" --dry-run. It reports
whether Windows would accept the profile, and by which matching strategy,
without touching the screen. Most failures mean a monitor the profile expects
is not connected.
Something else. The tray application writes a log to
%APPDATA%\ModernMonitorSwitcher\msw.log. It is the first place to look, and
worth attaching to a bug report.
For the command line, turn logging up with an environment variable:
set MSW_LOG=debug
msw apply "Work"
The same variable raises the tray application's logging; it accepts anything
tracing
understands, so debug covers everything and ModernMonitorSwitcher=debug
covers only this application.
Windows exposes display topology through the CCD API: QueryDisplayConfig
reads the current arrangement, SetDisplayConfig puts one back. A profile is
the captured topology, stored as JSON in
%APPDATA%\ModernMonitorSwitcher\profiles.
The complication is that adapter LUIDs are not stable — Windows hands out new ones on every boot and on driver updates — so restoring a profile is not a matter of replaying what was recorded. The saved configuration has to be re-matched against the machine as it is now. Several strategies are tried in order, each anchored on something that is stable: path ids, then monitor device paths, then monitor names, then collapsing onto a single adapter.
Each candidate is checked with SDC_VALIDATE before anything is applied, so a
strategy Windows would reject never reaches the screen.
Monitor identity is only matched when it is unambiguous. Two monitors of the same model report the same friendly name, and mapping both onto whichever was found first would silently collapse two displays into one.
Needs Rust and, for the installer, the Tauri CLI.
cargo test --workspace # unit tests, no hardware needed
cargo run # build and launch the tray app, for working on it
# Windows ships powershell.exe (5.1); these scripts don't need pwsh (7).
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File tools/run-sandbox.ps1 # run it with throwaway settings, beside an installed copy
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File tools/install-local.ps1 # build the installer and install it
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File tools/build-release.ps1 # just build the installer, without installing itWork against a debug build. target/debug/ModernMonitorSwitcher.exe is the
same application and rebuilds in about five seconds after a change, against
roughly forty for a release build and a couple of minutes to produce an
installer. Build the installer when you are testing installing or updating,
not to try out a change.
cargo run uses your real settings and profiles, and quietly hands over to
an installed copy if one is running. tools/run-sandbox.ps1 does neither: it
runs the debug build against an empty scratch folder, so it opens on the
first-run guide every time (-Keep carries the last run's data over). It
will not change Start with Windows or install updates. Switching profiles
still changes your real displays.
The release profile uses thin LTO rather than full. Full LTO with a single codegen unit saved about 0.9 MB and cost two minutes on every rebuild, which is the wrong way round for a desktop application that ships an installer over the internet a few times a year.
The layout:
msw-core has no dependency on either front end, which is what keeps a future
network control surface an addition rather than a rewrite.
Mozilla Public License 2.0.
The adapter-matching strategies are ported from MonitorSwitcher by Martin Krämer, which solved this problem first and solved it properly. See NOTICE.md.