I have a plasma TV attached to my Mac Pro. I use it maybe once a week, to watch movies. Rest of the time it just stays connected to my Mac. The problem is that Spaces in bird eye’s view always displays a box for the plasma, which makes my main display’s box too small.

Is there a way to disable the secondary display without actually unplugging it?

7 Answers

Sorry this happens to be a year later, but I was just looking for a way to disable my secondary display and came across SwitchResX. It has a taskbar menu item to quickly disable any connected monitors.

I'm not sure if this will solve your Spaces issue, but it might be worth a try.

4

Since SwitchResX is not free, I have developed a simple free alternative, that allows you to turn off a specific Monitor.

16

The only thing I can come up with which worked for me was to turn on mirroring (in the monitor menu in your menu bar, or in the screen preferences pane) and then turn off the secondary display. Spaces will then only show one display.

When you want it back (for watching movies, etc.), turn on the display and turn off mirroring.

This solution feels very kludgy to me, so I'm hoping there's a better answer (like 3rd-party software or a hidden pref which can be set via Terminal). But it should suffice for the short term.

6

mirror-displays is a command-line utility to toggle mirroring that works flawlessly for me on Catalina. It hasn't gotten an update in about 3 years but it still seems to be somewhat maintained.

Because it toggles mirroring on when you run it, then off when you run it again, I've set up a zsh alias in ~/.zshrc:

alias flippy="mirror && mirror"

I found a different approach which works for my use case - showing a single monitor when connecting remotely to a multi monitor setup using Screen sharing.

All you have to do is enable "Display Mirroring", and the mac will automatically make it so all apps that were on different monitors are now on the one monitor.

More info in this similar question on AskDifferent stack exchange

i'm dealing with the same issue

MBP 16" + 27" monitor on my desk, and the need to control it via remote desktop

Remote desktop is not easy to use with multiple monitor (you see only one at a time, you can't drag and drop between screens, you can't move windows between screens, etc)

Turning on miroring is a solution but i really would like to find a way to disable the external monitor

One solution, a weird one but i have no other solution at the moment, is to plug the monitor to a remote controlled electric plug, and to switch on/off this plug via an app wich can be scripted (a one clic solution)

It cost 5 to 10$ (or €) and a bit of work to make it "one-clic"

There can be some issue : the wifi need to be live, the plug need to work without bug, and some monitors need a physical press on their "power" button to wake-up

Maybe i'll try that one day

disconnect the second display and then click "detect displays" that did for me

1

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