meet the disper

I'm using Ubuntu with an Nvidia video card and whenever I plug in an external display, there is a lot of fiddling around with the nvidia-settings tool. Meet the disper utility. With it, you can manipulate your displays from the command line. For my current laptop, I have my configuration file at ~/.disper/config set up like so:


--cycle-stages="-e -r max : -s"

The value of cycle-stages is a colon-delimited list of stages. The first one extends the desktop onto the external display using the maximum resolution available. And the second stage activates only the primary display. I also have a keyboard shortcut mapped to:

disper -C

which cycles through the stages defined in the config file. No more fiddling!

Get the PPA for disper here.