Julius Plenz – Blog

I have a pair of new monitors (Dell U2312HM, find them here). I used to have one somewhat cheap 18.5" widescreen with 1366x768 (which is the same resolution as my Thinkpad X220), but reading long texts or working long hours really tired my eyes a lot.

The new screens have nice 23" IPS panels with great viewing angles. But most important of all, I can adjust the height of the screens and rotate them. Now my desk looks like this:

The X220 can only have two monitors connected at once. Also, the Docking Station's DVI output is single link. Thus, I connect one of the monitors via VGA and the other via DVI.

I use a simple shell script that is invoked when I press Fn+F7. Note that you have to turn off the LVDS1 internal display first before you can activate the two screens at once.

if [ $(xrandr -q | grep -c "   1920x1080      60.0 +") -eq 2 ]; then
  xrandr --output LVDS1 --off
  xrandr --output HDMI3 --auto --rotate left --output VGA1 --auto --right-of HDMI3 --primary
else
  xrandr --output VGA1 --off --output HDMI3 --off
  xrandr --output LVDS1 --auto
fi