Add feature to quickly swap identical displays

[waydabber]

MacOS can't tell apart fully identical displays (when both model, vendor number and serial numbers are the same - displays should have an unique serial number but some display manufacturers fail to set this properly and simply give the same serial to entire manufacturing batches or sometimes model ranges).

This is a great annoyance to some users as in the display layout the displays tend to swap places randomly (for example left becomes right and Vice Versa).

A keyboard shortcut could be added to quickly swap identical displays in the layout.

[arianitu]

Is this problem solvable? It's absolutely infuriating and at this point I'm about to buy two monitors that are not identical.

If you're running into this, run the below command:

ioreg -l | grep EDID

You will notice your monitor has the same ManufacturerID, YearOfManufacture, SerialNumber, ProductName and AlphanumericSerialNumber.

I'm running a Benq monitor so maybe stay away from those monitors.

[waydabber]

Unfortunately it is difficult to fully solve this problem. For a multi-monitor setups with identical displays it is best to get informed from the manufacturer whether they change some or any of the identifiers between manufacturing batches and select accordingly or if they have firmware upgrade capabilities that lets you change the serial number of an unit. Some displays also have a hidden factory menu that allows updating the EDID (EDID write) with the appropriate software, rewriting the serial number of the display, exactly to cover this and similar scenarios. If there is no solution, then you can resort to connecting one of the displays via HDMI as that might be differentiating enough for the OS, or can use an EDID override pass-thru dongle and with this you can override the model number or serial number of the display.

But: I can add the keyboard shortcut thing to swap the places (origin coordinates) of the displays in the display layout, that is certainly possible.

[waydabber]

In fact, I'll add this swapping feature to the next update as it's not that difficult to do and would help some.

[waydabber]

The swap algorithm will attempt to swap these:

• resolution
• refresh rate
• bits per pixel
• orientation
• HDR status
• location in the display layout

The feature will work on display sets that have exactly 2 identical displays based on serial, vendor number and model number. Sets with three or more displays will not be affected.