displaymacos
I use my MacBook with an external monitor at work and home. Unfortunately, they are both the same model and this seems to confuse OS X.
At work, I have the monitor on the left and at home the right. But each time I move from one to the other, I have to manually change the arrangement.
Does OS X not remember arrangement for multiple monitors, or is using the same model the source of confusion here?
You don't need to worry about Spaces for this. What you need to do is go into:
System Preferences --> Displays --> Arrangement
Drag the icon representing your external monitor to the top of the icon representing your macbook monitor:
You can also drag the bar representing your menubar/dock to whichever monitor you want to be your "main" display.
Stay is a pretty cheap app who's primary purpose is to save default positions for applications of screen, and automatically be able to rearrange them to this default state.
However, it has multiple display support, and as a side effect, it can be used to restore previously used display arrangements.
Best Answer
Even in 2019 macOS fails to preserve my monitor layout. I wrote a tool called displayplacer that lets describe your monitor layout as a terminal command. I then use BetterTouchTool to execute these profiles via hotkeys. It solved the same problem for me of using the same model monitor at work (in portrait mode) as at home (in landscape mode).
For example, on my 4 monitor setup at home I have this profile:
displayplacer "id:A46D2F5E-487B-CC69-C588-ECFD519016E5 res:3840x2160 hz:60 color_depth:8 scaling:off origin:(0,0) degree:0" "id:F466F621-B5FA-04A0-0800-CFA6C258DECD res:1440x900 color_depth:4 scaling:on origin:(-1440,1437) degree:0" "id:4C405A05-8798-553B-3550-F93E7A7722BB res:1440x2560 color_depth:8 scaling:off origin:(3840,-363) degree:270" "id:18173D22-3EC6-E735-EEB4-B003BF681F30 res:1920x1200 color_depth:8 scaling:off origin:(960,-1200) degree:0"Also available via Homebrew
brew tap jakehilborn/jakehilborn && brew install displayplacer