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phillipberndt / autorandr

Auto-detect the connected display hardware and load the appropriate X11 setup using xrandr
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configuration-management x11 xrandr

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autorandr

Automatically select a display configuration based on connected devices

Branch information

This is a compatible Python rewrite of wertarbyte/autorandr. Contributions for bash-completion, fd.o/XDG autostart, Nitrogen, pm-utils, and systemd can be found under contrib.

The original wertarbyte/autorandr tree is unmaintained, with lots of open pull requests and issues. I forked it and merged what I thought were the most important changes. If you are searching for that version, see the legacy branch. Note that the Python version is better suited for non-standard configurations, like if you use --transform or --reflect. If you use auto-disper, you have to use the bash version, as there is no disper support in the Python version (yet). Both versions use a compatible configuration file format, so you can, to some extent, switch between them. I will maintain the legacy branch until @wertarbyte finds the time to maintain his branch again.

If you are interested in why there are two versions around, see #7, #8 and especially #12 if you are unhappy with this version and would like to contribute to the bash version.

License information and authors

autorandr is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License (version 3).

Contributors to this version of autorandr are:

Installation/removal

You can use the autorandr.py script as a stand-alone binary. If you'd like to install it as a system-wide application, there is a Makefile included that also places some configuration files in appropriate directories such that autorandr is invoked automatically when a monitor is connected or removed, the system wakes up from suspend, or a user logs into an X11 session. Run make install as root to install it.

If you prefer to have a system wide install managed by your package manager, you can

We appreciate packaging scripts for other distributions, please file a pull request if you write one.

If you prefer pip over your package manager, you can install autorandr with:

sudo pip install "git+http://github.com/phillipberndt/autorandr#egg=autorandr"

or simply

sudo pip install autorandr

if you prefer to use a stable version.

How to use

Save your current display configuration and setup with:

autorandr --save mobile

Connect an additional display, configure your setup and save it:

autorandr --save docked

Now autorandr can detect which hardware setup is active:

$ autorandr
  mobile
  docked (detected)

To automatically reload your setup:

$ autorandr --change

To manually load a profile:

$ autorandr --load <profile>

or simply:

$ autorandr <profile>

autorandr tries to avoid reloading an identical configuration. To force the (re)configuration:

$ autorandr --load <profile> --force

To prevent a profile from being loaded, place a script call block in its directory. The script is evaluated before the screen setup is inspected, and in case of it returning a value of 0 the profile is skipped. This can be used to query the status of a docking station you are about to leave.

If no suitable profile can be identified, the current configuration is kept. To change this behaviour and switch to a fallback configuration, specify --default <profile>. The system-wide installation of autorandr by default calls autorandr with a parameter --default default. There are three special, virtual configurations called horizontal, vertical and common. They automatically generate a configuration that incorporates all screens connected to the computer. You can symlink default to one of these names in your configuration directory to have autorandr use any of them as the default configuration without you having to change the system-wide configuration.

You can store default values for any option in an INI-file located at ~/.config/autorandr/settings.ini. In a config section, you may place any default values in the form option-name=option-argument.

A common and effective use of this is to specify default skip-options, for instance skipping the gamma setting if using redshift as a daemon. To implement the equivalent of --skip-options gamma, your settings.ini file should look like this:

[config]
skip-options=gamma

Advanced usage

Hook scripts

Three more scripts can be placed in the configuration directory (as defined by the XDG spec, usually ~/.config/autorandr or ~/.autorandr if you have an old installation for user configuration and /etc/xdg/autorandr for system wide configuration):

These scripts must be executable and can be placed directly in the configuration directory, where they will always be executed, or in the profile subdirectories, where they will only be executed on changes regarding that specific profile.

Instead (or in addition) to these scripts, you can also place as many executable files as you like in subdirectories called script_name.d (e.g. postswitch.d). The order of execution of scripts in these directories is by file name, you can force a certain ordering by naming them 10-wallpaper, 20-restart-wm, etc.

If a script with the same name occurs multiple times, user configuration takes precedence over system configuration (as specified by the XDG spec) and profile configuration over general configuration.

As a concrete example, suppose you have the files

and switch from mobile to docked. Then ~/.config/autorandr/docked/postswitch is executed, since the profile specific configuration takes precedence, and ~/.config/autorandr/postswitch.d/notify-herbstluftwm is executed, since it has a unique name.

If you switch back from docked to mobile, ~/.config/autorandr/postswitch is executed instead of the docked specific postswitch.

If you experience issues with xrandr being executed too early after connecting a new monitor, then you can use a predetect script to delay the execution. Write e.g. sleep 1 into that file to make autorandr wait a second before running xrandr.

Variables

Some of autorandr's state is exposed as environment variables prefixed with AUTORANDR_, such as:

with the intention that they can be used within the hook scripts.

For instance, you might display which profile has just been activated by including the following in a postswitch script:

notify-send -i display "Display profile" "$AUTORANDR_CURRENT_PROFILE"

The one kink is that during preswitch, AUTORANDR_CURRENT_PROFILE is reporting the upcoming profile rather than the current one.

Wildcard EDID matching

The EDID strings in the ~/.config/autorandr/*/setup files may contain an asterisk to enable wildcard matching: Such EDIDs are matched against connected monitors using the usual file name globbing rules. This can be used to create profiles matching multiple (or any) monitors.

udev triggers with NVidia cards

In order for udev to detect drm events from the native NVidia driver, the kernel parameter nvidia-drm.modeset must be set to 1. For example, add a file /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-drm-modeset.conf:

options nvidia_drm modeset=1

Wayland

Before running autorandr will check the environment for the WAYLAND_DISPLAY variable to check if the program is running in a Wayland session. This is to avoid issues between usage of xrandr in Wayland environments.

If you need to run autorandr in a Wayland environment, one workaround is to unset the WAYLAND_DISPLAY variable before running the program, such as:

WAYLAND_DISPLAY= autorandr

Changelog

autorandr 1.15

autorandr 1.14

autorandr 1.13.3

autorandr 1.13.2

autorandr 1.13.1

autorandr 1.13

autorandr 1.12.1

autorandr 1.12

autorandr 1.11

autorandr 1.10.1

autorandr 1.10

autorandr 1.9

autorandr 1.8.1

autorandr 1.8

autorandr 1.7

autorandr 1.6

autorandr 1.5

autorandr 1.4

autorandr 1.3

autorandr 1.2

autorandr 1.1

autorandr 1.0