displaymacos
My mac is connected to 2 displays. Mac is in the center, one display is in the left and one in the right.
Sometimes it happens that when I disconnect and connect my mac from displays, display 1 becomes 3 and 3 becomes 1.
If I change their location inside Display section in System Preferences location becomes correct but all icons from display 1 stays on display 3. The same for display 3 whose icons are on 1.
Is it possible to fix this without relocation of physical monitors?
I don't have an external monitor to test this on, but you could look at an app called Swapp that purports to be able to swap the contents of an external screen onto your main display. I'm not sure if it works with more than 1 external monitor, but in theory you might be able to switch to a 2nd desktop on your MBP, and swap the windows from an external monitor onto it, hopefully being able to repeat the trick with a 3rd monitor on a 3rd desktop space.
There is also Display maid which looks similar.
Both have free trials.
You could also try this relatively simple but manual trick to shove windows to another desktop space, either before removing your external monitors or after:
Enable Desktop Space control keys in System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Mission Control, check the boxes as follows:
To move windows, click and hold on any window titlebar and hit Control+2, Control+1, or Control+3 to instantly bring the chosen window to the desktop corresponding to the keyboard shortcut
I've found one solution to this: reseting my mac's NVRAM. This seems to reset the order of my monitors to how it was before. However, if I leave my Thunderbolt 3 display connected while booting my mac, the problem will come back again.
I'll wait a while before marking my own answer as the accepted solution to this question since a) it's not a particularly good solution, and b) I'd like to give other people a chance to post a better one.
Best Answer
One thing you could try is resetting the NVRAM of your Mac to see if that resolves this.
You don't specify the model of your Mac, so below are some generic steps that will work to reset the NVRAM on all Mac models:
Note: When you log back in you may need to readjust some of your system preferences (e.g. speaker volume, screen resolution, startup disk selection, time zone information, etc).