autorandr

Automatically select a display configuration based on connected devices

Branch information

The original wertarbyte/autorandr tree seems unmaintained, with lots of open pull requests and issues. I forked it and merged what I thought were the most important changes. I will maintain this branch until @wertarbyte finds the time to maintain his branch again.

License information and authors

Stefan Tomanek came up with and wrote the initial version of autorandr. He currently does not maintain it, and did not express his opinion concerning an OSS license in two independent requests. To resolve the licensing issue, all non-trivial code in this fork has been reimplemented by various authors that have agreed to release their code under the terms of the GNU General Public License (version 3).

This license will apply to versions of autorandr from this fork that are committed after issue #7 has been resolved, and versions derived from that one. In particular, wertarbyte's original repository is still not OSS, and the current version in this repository is neither.

Contributors to this version of autorandr are:

• Alexander Wirt
• Chris Dunder
• Maciej Sitarz
• Matthew R Johnson
• Phillip Berndt
• Timo Bingmann
• Tomasz Bogdal
• stormc
• tachylatus

How to use

Save your current display configuration and setup with:

autorandr --save mobile

Connect an additional display, configure your setup and save it:

autorandr --save docked

Now autorandr can detect which hardware setup is active:

 $ autorandr
   mobile
   docked (detected)

To automatically reload your setup, just append --change to the command line

To manually load a profile, you can use the --load <profile> option.

autorandr tries to avoid reloading an identical configuration. To force the (re)configuration, apply --force.

To prevent a profile from being loaded, place a script call block in its directory. The script is evaluated before the screen setup is inspected, and in case of it returning a value of 0 the profile is skipped. This can be used to query the status of a docking station you are about to leave.

If no suitable profile can be identified, the current configuration is kept. To change this behaviour and switch to a fallback configuration, specify --default <profile>.

Another script called postswitch can be placed in the directory ~/.autorandr as well as in all profile directories: The scripts are executed after a mode switch has taken place and can notify window managers or other applications about it.

While the script uses xrandr by default, calling it by the name autodisper or auto-disper forces it to use the disper utility, which is useful for controlling nvidia chipsets. The formats for fingerprinting the current setup and saving/loading the current configuration are adjusted accordingly.

To install autorandr call make install, define your setup and then call make hotplug to install hotplug scripts.

For Debian using auto-disper: To make the screen auto-configure when your computer wakes up,

• Copy auto-disper into /usr/local/bin/
• Copy pm-utils/40auto-disper into /etc/pm/sleep.d/
• (Assuming gnome) Run gnome-keybinding-properties and ADD a shortcut, I called it "Run auto-disper", I set it to CTRL-F7, and the command is: auto-disper -c --default default
• Create a default disper setting... eg for laptop: unplug all monitors, set up the screen nicely on the laptop display. Then run auto-disper --save laptop