Autorandr Setup
Tool for managing multiple monitor setup, eg. laptop on the road and docked in the office
Created Jul 23, 2024 - Last updated: Jul 23, 2024
Intro
Autorandr is a tool to help manage switching between screen configurations on linux, most useful when using a minimal window manager, where you don’t have some other built-in solution for handling it.
Install
The tool can be installed with PIP (Python Package Manager) or with your native package manager.
| Tool | Command |
|---|---|
| Pip | sudo pip install autorandr |
| Arch | sudo pacman -S autorandr |
| Debian, Ubuntu | sudo apt install autorandr |
Setup / Usage
To setup the tool so that it does its magic i fairly straight forward.
The first step is to save you current screen setup, saving the current and future setups uses the same command.
Open a terminal and run this command autorandr --save <name of profile>
Autorandr will now create the ~/.config/autorandr folder and a sub-folder with the name of the profile you just saved.
The profile you have now represents how you screens are currently configured, so the next step is to setup your screens for your other configurations, one at a time, and use the save command with a different name for each of them.
By calling the autorandr command without any arguments it will display a list of all your configured profiles and which one it is currently using, will look something like this:
$ autorandr
docked (current)
mobile
Autorandr will not automatically change the profile, but it provides a simple command to do it, call autorandr --change to go to the profile that matches your currently connected screens, depending on how your profiles was configured when you saved them.
Autorandr will not by default reload a profile if it is currently active, so to do that you, and use the change command with the force flag by calling autorandr --change --force
You can also specify the specific profile you want to change to by adding the --load <profile name>
This was a quick entry to using the Authrandr command, however it can do many more advanced things, so take a look at the official documentation autorandr