For years my Mac moved all my windows onto one monitor every time it woke up, unlocked or went back on the dock. I finally sat down with an AI to build a small menu bar fix for myself, and had something working in under 24 hours. What surprised me was where the time went. The code came fast. Understanding what macOS actually does took the rest. Sleep is a disconnect. Most external monitors drop their link when the Mac sleeps, so macOS moves their windows to a screen that's still there and never moves them back. Identical monitors can look like the same monitor. Many report the same serial number, so "which screen was this window on?" is not a trivial question. Saving on a timer is a trap. The obvious approach is to snapshot window positions every few seconds. But if a snapshot runs right after a wake, you save the mess macOS just made instead of your real layout. None of that is in the code an AI gives you on the first try. You only learn it by living with the problem. What platform quirk ate most of your time on something you vibecoded?
Every time my Mac woke up, got unlocked or went back on the dock, my windows ended up piled on one monitor. I'd spend the first minutes of the day dragging them back. Every single time. I tried several apps, Stay among others. Most of them want you to save a layout and restore it, and since my setup changes during the day, the saved layout was always out of date. So one day I got fed up and sat down with an AI to build exactly what I wanted: a menu bar app that remembers where each window was and puts it back when the displays come back. No layouts to save. I had a working version in under 24 hours. The code wasn't the hard part. macOS was: identical monitors can report the same serial number, sleep counts as a disconnect, and if you save on a timer you end up saving the mess macOS just made instead of your real layout. I shipped it as Many Displays (manydisplays.com, 14-day free trial). Curious: what's the longest-standing annoyance you finally fixed by vibecoding your own tool?
After a sleep or a lid close, an HDR monitor on a Mac can come back dim or oversaturated, either with the High Dynamic Range switch turned off or with it still on while the monitor has dropped to SDR. The write-up covers what people report going back to 2020, how to tell which of the two cases you have, and the fixes that work without an app. It also says where my app does not help, because it cannot see the second case. https://manydisplays.com/mac-hdr... If you run an HDR monitor on your Mac, I'd like to hear which model and whether it keeps HDR after sleep.
