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When it comes to managing dual monitors I would say that there are some things that the Mac does better than Windows, while Windows does some things better than the Mac. I’ve used an external monitor with my laptop for years, but in my book neither operating system gets it exactly right.

To elaborate on that the Mac generally has better features for managing your secondary monitor. For example, I can rotate the screen orientation without needing a third-party application or a video card control center installed. The thing that drives me bonkers on a Mac, however, is the fact that the Menubar can only be located on one screen. This isn’t like the Windows Taskbar being located on only one monitor because the Mac Menubar includes all of the application-specific menus. So even though you’re working in an application on monitor #2 you actually have to move your mouse back to monitor #1 to access any of the menus. The only thing you can do is choose which monitor the Menubar appears on.

I went looking around for a solution, and to my surprise I couldn’t find a single application that could duplicate the Menubar on a secondary monitor. The closest thing I found was a free app called DejaMenu that is capable of displaying the contents of the Menubar in a drop-down list, but the only way to initiate it is through a keyboard shortcut. It’s good enough for me:

dejamenu-2.jpg

Windows users don’t have this problem since the menus for each application are stored within the application window. I’m sure you can imagine how unproductive this can make be when you’re frequently moving your mouse back and forth between monitors. On my Mac DejaMenu has saved me a bunch of time because of this.

  1. Ouch, that would drive me bonkers too. For sure this is better than nothing. Good to see OSX designers are not perfect in the usability department either :) (the separation of the application specific menu from the application is generally touted as a usability win I believe)

  2. If you hold the control key while clicking a one button mouse, you will get a contextual menu under the pointer where ever you are. And if you have a 2 button mouse, you can do the same with a right click.

  3. Change wrote:
    Ouch, that would drive me bonkers too. For sure this is better than nothing. Good to see OSX designers are not perfect in the usability department either :) (the separation of the application specific menu from the application is generally touted as a usability win I believe)

    It’s nice having the application menu separated because it gives more room for the UI, but it does have downsides like the one this article focuses on. The usability factor can definitely be improved for multi-monitor displays.

    emaven wrote:
    If you hold the control key while clicking a one button mouse, you will get a contextual menu under the pointer where ever you are. And if you have a 2 button mouse, you can do the same with a right click.

    Sure, but that wasn’t really what this article was about. Our problem was not having easy access to the Mac Menubar (File, View, etc…) for applications on a secondary monitor.