Features
Every tool
in the toolbag.
DisplayMason is small on purpose — a menu bar utility that does a handful of things with uncommon care. Here’s all of it.
Alignment
Point at the edge.
That’s the whole gesture.
Choose Align a Display… from the menu bar, pick the display to move, then hold your pointer at the edge of the display that stays put — left, right, above, or below. A guidance HUD narrates the whole time, and the arrangement lands with edges seamed and centers matched.
- Pointer-driven anchor and edge selection — no thumbnail dragging
- Live HUD guidance: “Studio Display will move to the right”
- Esc cancels safely; a stuck alignment times out on its own
- Quick Arrange snaps a display left, right, above, or below in one click
Saved Desks
A desk for every place you work.
Save the current arrangement as a named desk — Home, Office Dock, Studio Rig — and apply any of them from the menu in one click. Rename and delete as your setup evolves. Desks live in the app’s sandboxed container, quietly.
- Save, apply, rename, and delete named desks
- Desks capture position and the displays that belong to them
- Matched by stable display identifiers, not just names
Auto-Restore
It recognizes the room.
When the displays you reconnect exactly match a saved desk, DisplayMason restores the most recently updated one automatically. Dock at the office, and the office layout is simply there — before you’ve reached for the trackpad.
- Exact-topology matching before anything moves
- Partial matches are reported, never silently applied
- Resolution or scaling changes leave restore in review mode — stale coordinates can’t create gaps or overlaps
Undo
Confidence is an escape hatch.
Every arrangement and mirroring change keeps a one-step undo in the menu, labeled with exactly what it will revert — “Undo Align Studio Display.” Try a layout. Hate it. Take it back. Nothing about your desk is ever a commitment.
Display Tools
The rest of the drawer.
Mirroring
Mirror the main display to any secondary panel for a presentation, then return to an extended desktop from the same menu.
Wallpaper sync
Set one image across every connected display through the sandboxed file picker — access lasts exactly as long as it should.
Global shortcut
Open DisplayMason from any app with a system-wide hot key, registered through native APIs.
HUD feedback
Success, cancellation, timeout, or failure — every outcome is reported in a quiet HUD and the menu itself.
Engineering
Built like masonry.
Level, plumb, and honest about its materials.
No Accessibility permission
Pointer location, display arrangement, and the global shortcut all use macOS APIs that don’t require Accessibility access. There is nothing to grant.
No display rotation — on purpose
macOS has no supported public API for changing rotation, so DisplayMason doesn’t offer it. No private APIs, no fragile hacks that break every September.
Deterministic by design
Arrangement math is pure geometry behind service seams, exercised by a deterministic unit suite — CI never rearranges its own host.
Native licensing
StoreKit 2, one non-consumable unlock, zero third-party runtime dependencies.
Tech specs, the short version.
- Requires
- macOS Sonoma 14 or later
- Form factor
- Menu bar utility
- Built with
- Swift & SwiftUI, native frameworks only
- Permissions
- None beyond standard sandbox entitlements
- Licensing
- One-time unlock via StoreKit 2
- Data
- Desks stored locally in the app’s container