Running multiple monitors with OS X?
This post was published 2 years 10 months 29 days ago and its content may not be valid anymore.For anyone that is running a dual monitor setup with OS X, you’ve most likley questioned Apple’s reasons for not providing a little more flexibility with the Menu Bar. Thankfully, there are others out there that have questioned why menu items are not more easily accessible from a secondary monitor when the menu is located on the primary.
At current there are two solutions (that I am aware of) for circumventing the problem of menu items being located a few mouse swipes across the table (3500+ pixels can be a long way to travel). Check out either of the following which provide additional methods for accessing crucial Menu Bar items no matter which display is set to be the primary.
- StepMenus – Provides a NeXT Step style main menu for Cocoa Mac OS X applications. Menu Bar items for the currently active application will be displayed in a simple floating box menu.
- DejaMenu – Will display the current application’s main menu as a contextual menu when a key combination is pressed.
StepMenus does not look as though it has been updated in quite some time but DejaMenus recently received its 1.2.1 update in August 2006. StepMenus is a PPC release while DejaMenus is provided as a Universal Binary.
If there are any other applications / utilities worth checking out, drop your recommendations in the comments.
Doubt anyone will notice this comment but…
Whenever I CTRL-click on something in my second monitor the menu shows up on the main monitor. Anyone else notice this?
AK, I had that problem with Firefox (right clicking and autocomplete boxes appeared on my laptop monitor when they were supposed to be on my external). A simple restart of Firefox helped (That instance of Firefox had been running since before I first plugged in my external monitor). That’s the only problems I’ve had though.
I hope that’s of some use…
jack