Assigning a virtual desktop to a monitor in Windows 10

Is there a way to assign a virtual desktop to a monitor in Windows 10 (i.e. have every monitor show a different VD)?

Traveling Tech Guy

Posted 2015-08-31T17:35:23.470

Reputation: 8 743

1I wish I had this feature... – Mahdi Alkhatib – 2016-03-30T13:12:33.807

1Did you find a solution since then? – Jo Colina – 2017-03-26T19:40:39.540

@JoColina there is no solution - see the accepted answer – Traveling Tech Guy – 2017-03-31T18:55:37.383

Answers

Unfortunately not with the windows 10 feature. Each virtual desktop contains all of your monitors. So when you switch to another virtual desktop you are switching to a new virtual desktop that spans all of your monitors.

Maybe one of the third party solutions can do this and run on Windows 10.

IronSean

Posted 2015-08-31T17:35:23.470

Reputation: 341

2This is to be expected. A desktop is a single entity in Windows. You cannot connect a monitor and NOT display the desktop on it. So to expect it to display different desktops is out of character for the "desktop" feature itself. – Ramhound – 2015-08-31T17:55:07.717

23Just because it's "out of character" doesn't mean it wouldn't make an awesome feature. This is how spaces work on Mac OS X. It's a pain working with an external monitor on a laptop and having all your programs move to your laptop monitor when you disconnect your second display. – cornflakes24 – 2015-12-12T20:46:41.000

7This is also how many tiling windows managers work on Linux like Xmonad, in fact often the only way it works. Every workspace is projected to a monitor (if there's no monitor available, it just acts like a virtual monitor), and you can switch the layout mapping between workspace to monitor very easily. – CMCDragonkai – 2017-01-26T06:16:38.947

I may be late to the party, but there is a workaround that can get near what you want to do:

Type Win + Tab to show up the Multiple Desktops panel also showing windows of the current desktop. Right click on one of them and you can choose either "Show this window on all desktops" or "Show windows from this app on all desktops". You can now switch desktop and they'll stick to the screen.
Afaik, if you choose the 2nd option, it will remember your choice even if you close all windows from the app at one point.

hope it helps

fesses_flasques

Posted 2015-08-31T17:35:23.470

Reputation: 519

8+1 nice hack :) – Doc – 2018-10-21T04:26:37.080

You should tell everyone about this feature, nice one. – Yami Odymel – 2019-03-06T23:20:45.127

While this is useful information I don't see how it helps getting every monitor to show a different virtual desktop. – Miserable Variable – 2019-05-21T18:08:30.913

3This does exactly what I need. Thank you. – Lan – 2019-08-30T14:36:44.053

This is a cool hack! – distante – 2019-12-07T15:45:15.180

2This is definitely a useful middle ground I wasn't aware of when I first answered. Keeping your chat app permanently on your laptop screen regardless of virtual desktop used for instance is a nice use case. I still wish the windows team could re-architect it a bit to work more like Mac spaces though... – IronSean – 2020-01-22T21:11:08.720