If you feel more as a Microsoft family member you might want to use .NET commands. Try

NET.addAssembly('System.Windows.Forms');
System.Windows.Forms.Screen.PrimaryScreen.Bounds

or

System.Windows.Forms.SystemInformation.PrimaryMonitorSize

and you get something like

ans = 

  System.Drawing.Rectangle
  Package: System.Drawing

  Properties:
    Location: [1x1 System.Drawing.Point]
        Size: [1x1 System.Drawing.Size]
           X: 0
           Y: 0
       Width: 1920
      Height: 1080
        Left: 0
         Top: 0
       Right: 1920
      Bottom: 1080
     IsEmpty: 0
       Empty: [1x1 System.Drawing.Rectangle]

Greetings,

Thomas

@Thomas – the problem with your .NET solution is that it only works on Windows; the Java-based solution in my post works on all Matlab platforms, including Mac and Linux.

As for me the solution using java.awt.Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit.getScreenSize does not work correctly when using more than one monitor.
Better use:

ge = javaObjectEDT(java.awt.GraphicsEnvironment.getLocalGraphicsEnvironment());
gs = ge.getScreenDevices();
jmonitorposition = [];
if ~isempty(gs)
  for iRun_ = 1:size(gs,1)
     dm = gs(iRun_).getDisplayMode();
     jmonitorposition(iRun_,:) = [1 1 dm.getWidth dm.getHeight];
  end
end

Best regards
Matthias

Hi Yair,

Suppose I have two monitors. How can I tell a figure to appear on the secondary one, if it exists? I can do something like

hFig = figure('Units','normalized','Position',[1.10 0.10 0.80 0.70]);

but it doesn’t tell me whether the second screen exists or not (if not, it will effectively hide the figure).

Best regards

Hi,
maybe this can be helpful:

>> monitorPos = get(0,'MonitorPositions')
monitorPos =
           1           1        1600         900
        1601           1        3200         900

then you can play with ‘pixels’ positions

Hi @Marco,

Thank you for your comment. Unfortunately, your solution tells me only how many monitors I can have. What I need is to know how many monitors I currently have.

To be more precise, MonitorPositions tells me how many monitors I had at the time of Matlab’s startup. It does not change if I attach a monitor after startup. This is the behaviour in my Windows 8.1 laptop.

I can do a little trick to circumvent this problem. By using the PointerLocation, I can check on which monitor the pointer is. For example

% get root handle
hRoot = groot;
% check if (a) there are at least two monitors
%          (b) pointer's x location is larger than 2nd monitor's x0 position
if     size(hRoot.MonitorPositions,1) >= 2 ...
    && hRoot.PointerLocation(1) > hRoot.MonitorPositions(2,1)
    % put figure on the second monitor
else
    % put figure on the first monitor
end

However, as you can see, it assumes you have control over the cursor’s position during execution. I wish there was an option to tell how many active monitors are there.