Multi-monitor

Workspaces 1–9 spread across monitors with stable assignment that survives display unplug and replug: unplug at the office, replug at home, and every workspace lands back on the monitor you assigned it to.

Assigning workspace → monitor

[workspaces]
"1" = "Built-in"
"9" = "P34w-20"

The value is either the stable monitor ID (vendor:model:serial — logged at startup, copy it with a click in the ◱ menu bar menu) or part of the display name.

It can also be an array — a priority list where the first connected monitor wins, so the same config works at home and at the office:

[workspaces]
"1" = ["PHL", "P34w"]   # prefer PHL, fall back to P34w

Caution

Cheap panels often report serial 0. Two identical panels with the same matcher then collide — ancre disambiguates by adding a positional suffix (#1, #2, …) to the second one. Reordering the displays swaps which panel gets which suffix, which swaps their workspaces.

Behavior

• Unlisted workspaces spread over the remaining displays.
• A workspace whose display disconnects moves to a connected one and returns on replug — placement is a pure function (workspace names, config, connected monitors), no imperative migration, so a replug always reproduces the same result.
• The monitor ID is hardware-derived, not CGDirectDisplayID (which changes between sessions).
• Sleep or a closed lid can report zero connected displays; when that happens ancre leaves the current arrangement untouched instead of reassigning workspaces, so everything is back where it was on wake.
• Focus follows the workspace by name: moving focus to a monitor focuses whichever workspace is currently active on it, not a fixed workspace number.

Focus across monitors

hyper+, / hyper+. moves focus to the previous/next monitor. The bar has per-monitor overrides ([bar-overrides.*]) — see Bar.