Monitors goal

Last week I picked up a new Yoga ThinkPad to setup as a linux dev station. I used to use Arch Linux throughout university but drifted away from it since all my career systems have been OSX. I missed the customization and really always tried to make my iTerm2/vim configs feel like I was still in a tiling window manager.

So anyways – I picked up a ThinkPad and installed Arch + dwm. My setup for all of that will be its own blog post at some point.

I have two external displays and wanted to stand the Yoga up as a “third’ display.

Booting up with everything connected to a docker – unsurprisingly – things didn’t work out of the box.

xrandr and problems

Enter xrandr. My main issue was that all my monitors were listed with xrandr --listmonitors:

Monitors: 3
 0: +*eDP-1 1920/293x1080/165+0+1080  eDP-1
 1: +DP-3-1 2560/597x1440/336+1920+1080  DP-3-1
 2: +DP-3-2 1920/597x1080/336+0+0  DP-3-2

But the monitor DP-3-1 was displaying black, with “no source” from the connected HDMI.

Everything pointed to it should be working. The mouse could even enter the second blacked out monitor.

Thinking through it, I tried to manually set the --rate 144 for that output.

And yes! The monitor immediately finds the source and comes on. From there it was just setting up the orientation through xrandr and inverting the Yoga display since I have it opened like a book.

Here is my final script for initializing it all together:

#!/bin/sh

# Setup desk monitors.

MNTR_ASUS="DP-3-2"
MNTR_PRED="DP-3-1"
MNTR_YOGA="eDP-1"

#
# 1. Turn on ASUS 1920x1080 (144hz) monitor by setting the correct refresh rate
# 2. Flip the ThinkPad Yoga's display
# 3. Set monitor's relative positions
# 4. Restart feh
#
xrandr \
    --output ${MNTR_ASUS} --mode 1920x1080 --rate 144 \
    --output ${MNTR_YOGA} --rotate inverted \
    --output ${MNTR_ASUS} --above ${MNTR_YOGA} \
    --output ${MNTR_YOGA} --left-of ${MNTR_PRED}

${HOME}/.fehbg &

Simple as that :)

Thanks for reading!