Memmon remembers what your Mac forgets – A simple daemon that restores your window positions on external monitors.
This is a fork with improvements for multi-monitor setups (tested with 4 monitors on a Mac Studio).
- Debounced restore with retry logic – When monitors reconnect at staggered times, waits for all displays to come back before restoring. Uses a 2s delay when all expected monitors are present, or 10s when still waiting for more. Follows up with 4 retries at 3s intervals to handle AX timing issues.
- Proactive state saving – Saves window positions every 30s while all monitors are present, instead of only saving reactively during disconnect (when macOS has likely already scrambled windows).
- Graceful partial restore – Restores as many windows as possible when AX window count doesn't exactly match saved state, instead of skipping the entire app.
- Timer pause during restore – Prevents the periodic save from overwriting good state with scrambled positions during the restore window.
- Force Restore menu item – Re-apply saved positions on demand via the menu bar.
- File logging – Writes to
~/memmon.logfor debugging.
Set expectedScreens in src/main.swift to match your monitor count (default: 4).
Limitations:
- Currently, Memmon restores windows in other spaces only if the space is activated. If you know a way to access the accessibility settings of a different space, let me know.
- Support for the Mission Control config option “Displays have separate Spaces” is not tested.
- You will need macOS 10.10 or newer. Download and unzip the tar.gz from latest release.
- Grant Memmon the Accessibility privilege. Go to "System Preference" > "Security & Privacy" > "Accessibility" and add Memmon to that list. (Otherwise, the app has no purpose as it can't move application windows around.)
- Thats it. The app runs in your menu bar.
Alternatively, you can compile Memmon from source by running make, or call the script directly (swift src/main.swift) without building an app bundle.
You can hide the menu bar icon either via defaults or the same-titled menu entry.
If you do so, the only way to quit the app is by killing the process (with Activity.app or killall Memmon).
The menu bar icon stays hidden during this execution only. If you restart the OS or app it will reappear (unless you hide the icon with defaults).
Memmon has exactly one app-setting, the menu bar icon. You can manipulate the display of the icon, or hide the icon completely:
# disable menu bar icon completely
defaults write de.relikd.Memmon icon -int 0
# Use window-dots-icon
defaults write de.relikd.Memmon icon -int 1
# Use monitor-with-windows icon (default)
defaults write de.relikd.Memmon icon -int 2
# re-enable menu bar icon and use default icon
defaults delete de.relikd.Memmon icon
I am frustrated! Why does my Mac forget all window positions which I moved to a second screen? Every time I unplug the monitor. Every time I close my Macbook lid. Every time I lock my Mac.
Is it macOS 11? Is it the USB-C-to-HDMI converter dongle (notably one made by Apple)? Why do I have to fix things that Apple should have fixed long ago? …
Yes, for example, you can use Mjolnir or Hammerspoon (and some comercial ones) to restore your perfect window setup on a button press. But I do not need a full-fledged window manager or the dependencies it relies on. Nor do I want to constantly adjust for new windows. Actually, I don't want to think about this problem at all – I just want to fix this damn bug.
First off, Memmon is less than 300 lines of code – no dependencies.
You can audit it in 10 minutes...
And build it from scratch – just run make.
Secondly, it does one thing and one thing only: Save and restore window positions whenever your monitor setup changes.
You can either run the main.swift file directly with swift main.swift, via Terminal ./main.swift (chmod 755 main.swift), or create a new Xcode project.
In Xcode, select the Command-Line template and replace the template provided main.swift with this one.