Kerkia

Background

Remote desktop is used more and more in order to work on a computer that is remote, from a local computer. You can find this capability in most Windows version, in the accessories programs. One thing that is a bit annoying though is if you have two monitors and would like to work on your remote machine with using those two monitors. By default the remote desktop utility will show the remote desktop on one screen only.

Tip

One way you can launch the remote desktop connection is by typing mstsc in the command-line, mstsc.exe being that remote desktop connection utility. Now if you add /span to that command you will open the connection on al of your monitors. More precisely this will open the connection on a window that will cover the summary area of your physical monitors, meaning this will really work well if, and only if, all of your monitors have the size and resolution.

If you don’t really want to type the DOS command every time you can save the remote desktop connection to a file (click the Options button from the window and then “Save As…”) and edit that file. Append an additional line at the end that will look like this:

span monitors:i:1

When you then double click on that saved and edited connection, the connection will open on all of your monitors just like when you typed mstsc /span. Note that an additional useful line to add is:

screen mode id:i:2

This saves the full screen mode into the .rdp file. By default this option will be “screen mode id:i:1”, which is the windowed mode.

Now there is a drawback to this multi-screen remote connection mode: because this is just one window over multiple screens, all remote applications behave as if it was one large window, so applications get maximized over your screens, centered dialogs are split between your screens and the taskbar spans over both screens too, although arguably that one can be more nice than annoying. A simple workaround is to move/resize the windows, you can also use the vertically tile method (an easy way to do this is to click the first window, then hold the control key while right-clicking on the taskbar button of the second window, to finally select “Tile Vertically”.). Finally there are utilities on the web to work around these little annoyance of this multi-screen remote desktop mode, but they are not free. Let us know if you’d like Kerkia to build a free one!