Many Displays: Your Windows, Back Where You Left Them

Picture this: you open your MacBook at your desk, the external monitors blink awake, and macOS has done it again. Every window is piled onto one screen. Your browser sits on top of your editor, your chat app is hiding under a spreadsheet, and the one thing you actually need is on the wrong display. So you drag everything back, window by window, like a little morning ritual nobody asked for.

People have reported this to Apple since 2011. Apple's answer, as quoted by the person who filed the report: the issue "behaves as intended." Hundreds of "me too" votes later, the fix is not coming from Cupertino. It comes from a small menu bar app called Many Displays, and the pitch is almost suspicious: zero clicks.

What it does

Many Displays remembers where every window lives: which display, which position, which size. It saves that layout quietly while you work, a second or two after you move or resize anything. Then, when your Mac wakes, unlocks, logs back in or gets its dock plugged back in, it waits for the screens to settle and puts everything back on its own.

No layout to save, no shortcut to press, no button. You open the lid and your desk looks the way you left it. It even repairs the displays themselves first - arrangement, resolution, rotation, HDR - before touching a single window, and it remembers the windows sitting on your other Spaces, not only the visible one. While it works, the screens get a soft blur with a short countdown, so you are not watching windows hop around.

Built for identical monitors

The reason macOS shuffles everything is almost funny. Identical monitors often ship with identical serial numbers, so your Mac genuinely cannot tell your two screens apart and swaps them at random after every sleep. Many Displays was built for exactly that case: it tells identical monitors apart by their system UUID, then by the physical port they are plugged into, and only then by position. Two of the same model, three of the same model, it does not care.

It is also fast in the way that matters. Older window tools ask every app about every window through the Accessibility API, which is slow and stalls the moment one app stops answering. Many Displays reads the window server's own list instead: about 20 ms for hundreds of windows, without talking to any app. And when you undock and use the MacBook alone, it goes idle too. No timers, no polling, nothing.

Private by design

According to the developer, the app makes no network connections, has no analytics and asks for no account. Your layouts live in a plain JSON file in your Library folder, and the source is published on GitHub, so the claims are checkable rather than trusted. It needs the Accessibility permission to move windows - the same one Rectangle, Magnet and Moom ask for - and the site is explicit that it never reads window contents or keystrokes.

The catch

Many Displays is not free, and on a site called Freewares that deserves its own paragraph. You get a 14-day trial with everything unlocked, no account and no card. After that it is $19 USD, once, for up to three Macs, with a year of updates included. When the year ends, the last version you received keeps working forever; you only pay again if you want newer releases. There is a 14-day money-back guarantee on top.

It needs macOS 13 Ventura or later, on Apple Silicon or Intel. One honest limitation, per the developer's own FAQ: since macOS 14.5, Apple blocks apps from moving other apps' windows between Spaces, so windows come back to the right display but not always to the right virtual desktop.

Verdict

If you work on a single laptop screen, skip this entirely - the app itself goes to sleep when no external monitor is attached. But if your day involves a dock, two or three screens and the morning window shuffle, Many Displays is the rare utility you install once and never think about again. Which is exactly the point.

You can grab the trial at https://manydisplays.com/ and read the community's take on https://www.producthunt.com/products/many-displays