Move a panel between monitors in Gnome

January 21st, 2010

I’ve used two monitors for years now on a kinda cheap card with one DVI and one VGA port. Naturally, I use the DVI one as the primary monitor, keeping the VGA as a supplement for extra space. However, my card detects the VGA as the “primary” monitor and puts my Gnome panels on that monitor. I learned to live with it, almost enjoying the fact that my primary workspace had no decorations at all.

However, I got curious and dug into it to find the setting to change this:

gconftool-2 -s /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel/monitor --type int 1

Alternatively, use gconf-editor to navigate to that location and change monitor from 0 to 1 from there. I didn’t even need to re-login, it just hopped across to the other monitor.

UPDATE: Ya, so apparently you can just alt + left click to move the panel between monitors. The interwebs is awesome, thanks to mbooth in the comments for that one.

Posted by Jay
Filed in Geek, Linux
4 Comments »

4 Responses to “Move a panel between monitors in Gnome”


  1. Jason Dobies: Move a panel between monitors in Gnome | TuxWire : The Linux Blog
    January 21st, 2010 at 7:13 pm

    [...] original here: Jason Dobies: Move a panel between monitors in Gnome Share and [...]


  2. KageSenshi
    January 21st, 2010 at 10:55 pm

    try adding another panel with a windowlist applet on the other monitor :) ..

    GNOME is intelligent enough to separate the windowlist between the monitors :D


  3. mbooth
    January 22nd, 2010 at 5:51 am

    Did you know that you can alt-left-click and drag panels across to your other monitor?


  4. Jay
    January 22nd, 2010 at 8:41 am

    mbooth – AHH, so simple!

    I never tried modifiers when dragging, and when I tried new panel, it made it on the VGA monitor.

    Thanks all :D