Controlling Extended Desktops on Your Mac Laptop

Being able to work on extended desktops out of the box is one of the benefits of using a laptop. With an extended desktop, you can work on two monitors at a time. You can drag your cursor and windows around as if the two (or more) monitors were one continuous space.

With a desktop computer, you usually need to have multiple graphics adaptors or an adaptor with multiple VGA-outputs for this to work. On most modern laptops, however, the graphics card (whether onboard or discrete) is able to handle both mirroring (meaning the display on your LCD screen and the external monitor are the same) and extended desktops.

On Windows machines, you are limited to positioning your extended desktops side-by-side, unless you install add-on applications or if your display driver supports alternate positionings. You still have the option of selecting your external monitor on the left or right side of the screen, though.

With a Mac notebook, however, especially the latter versions of OS X, you can easily position the screens around to approximate the actual positioning of the monitors by just dragging and dropping. I’m assuming you’ve already plugged in your external monitor and clicked on Detect Displays to automatically detect and install the monitor. You must then activate the extended desktop by turning off display mirroring in Display Preferences.

This will then set your desktops to be the default setting: LCD to the left and external monitor to the right.

However, your displays may be positioned differently, and may not be situated horizontally with each other. For instance, the external monitor can be positioned on top of the laptop display. or, the external display is situated beside the laptop’s screen, but at a higher position.

To do this, you choose the Arrangement tab, which will let you drag around your screens to approximate your desired position. Take note that the one with the status bar above is your laptop’s LCD, which is the primary display.

This image below depicts the external monitor being diagonally situated to the left side of the laptop (meaning it’s higher).

Of course, the primary function of this feature is to easily tell your computer on which side your external display is–left, right or top. But being able to position the height relative to your LCD is surely one added bonus, especially if you’re particular about your mouse cursor going exactly where you perceive it should be, even across monitors.

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