If you’re using a single monitor, this article won’t be of much use to you. For the rest of you who have two (or more) monitors plugged into your box, you may be able to glean something of useful from this post. I’m sure the topic has been written to death elsewhere, and while there’s a few different ways to accomplish the same thing, this is my solution.

An example and the wrong solution, told as a story

First, the problem. If you’re written any GUI applications, I know you’ve done this at least once before: You create your GUI, you start attaching widgets to it, you launch it, you debug it, and about two or three hours into the project, you’re growing increasingly more annoyed with the window positioning. Maybe the window is attaching itself to the upper left corner, or maybe your window manager is genuinely trying hard to do the Right Thing thus leaving your application to appear randomly around the screen in a feeble attempt to cascade against something that doesn’t exist. Frustrated, you do something like this (SWT example):

// This assumes that display has already been created elsewhere.
// app is a class representing the main window for the application.
private void centerOnScreen ()
{
    Rectangle bounds = new Rectangle(0, 0, 0, 0);
    Rectangle desktopBounds = display.getBounds();
 
    bounds.x = (desktopBounds.width / 2) - (app.DEFAULT_WIDTH / 2);
    bounds.y = (desktopBounds.height / 2) - (app.DEFAULT_HEIGHT / 2);
    bounds.width = app.DEFAULT_WIDTH;
    bounds.height = app.DEFAULT_HEIGHT;
 
    shell.setBounds(bounds); // That'll teach 'em.
}

Your application is now centering itself on the screen. Great! No longer do you have to hunt around for the silly thing during debugging to drag it around, resize it, or otherwise mutter unsavory curses under your breath.

You then plug in a second monitor, and immediately those same unsavory words you uttered earlier have grown significantly worse. Now, with a second monitor, your nifty centerOnScreen() method centers the application between windows. “Curses,” you say, “I though I had the damn thing fixed!” Since your boss was kind enough to purchase two identical monitors, you figure you’ll draft up a quick fix:

// This assumes that display has already been created elsewhere.
// app is a class representing the main window for the application.
private void centerOnScreen ()
{
    Rectangle bounds = new Rectangle(0, 0, 0, 0);
    Rectangle desktopBounds = display.getBounds();
 
    bounds.x = (desktopBounds.width / 2) - (app.DEFAULT_WIDTH / 2);
    bounds.y = (desktopBounds.height / 2) - (app.DEFAULT_HEIGHT / 2);
    bounds.width = app.DEFAULT_WIDTH;
    bounds.height = app.DEFAULT_HEIGHT;
 
    // XXX: No one will ever have a monitor greater than 1920 pixels wide.
    if (desktopBounds.width > 1920)
        bounds.x = (desktopBounds.width / 2 / 2) - (app.DEFAULT_WIDTH / 2);
 
    shell.setBounds(bounds); // That'll teach 'em.
}

After such harrowing labor, your application is now back to normal and centering itself on the left-most monitor. You smile smugly, commit the changes, and go home for the day.

The next morning, you get an e-mail from one of the other developers in the office. He’s not particularly happy:

From: Bob Jones <[email protected]>
To: UI Design Team <[email protected]>
Subject: what’s wrong with the ui?

Hey guys, I just noticed that some changes made since yesterday have the application appearing kind of off my left screen. It spills over a bit onto the right monitor.

For what it’s worth, my monitors are of two different sizes so it’s kinda funky.

Oops. Dividing the desktop size in two (you have two monitors of identical dimensions) and then dividing that number in two doesn’t quite work when individual attached screens differ in width. Worse, what happens when someone buys a monitor with a horizontal resolution greater than 1920?

From: Milton Pencilpicker <[email protected]>
To: UI Design Team <[email protected]>
Subject: App keeps appearing waaaaaaay off to the side

Guys,

Did you say the app was supposed to start centering after the changes made yesterday? It’s still broken. It centers vertically just fine, but it’s about a quarter of the way over to the left. Just thought I’d let you know.

Yeah, this solution isn’t going to work. You need to account for resolutions on a per screen basis. So what do you do?

Probe some screens

Java exposes individuals screens through the GraphicsEnvironment singleton. The advantage of this method over getBounds() (or the Swing equivalent) is that you can easily determine the default device. Here’s one such example:

private GraphicsDevice defaultDevice;
private int defaultDeviceOffset = 0;
private ArrayList<Dimension> screens;
private int totalWidth = 0;
 
/**
 * Probe attached displays.
 * This method collects data related to all attached displays.
 * For illustrative purposes, we're recording the dimension of each
 * attached screen and recording it in the local screens arraylist.
 * We then add up the total screen width.
 */
private void probeDisplays ()
{
    GraphicsDevice[] devices = GraphicsEnvironment
        .getLocalGraphicsEnvironment()
        .getScreenDevices();
 
    defaultDevice = GraphicsEnvironment
        .getLocalGraphicsEnvironment()
        .getDefaultScreenDevice();
 
    for (int i = 0; i < devices.length; i++) {
        if (devices[i].equals(defaultDevice))
            // Do something when we encounter the default device.
            // One example would be to calculate the total screen
            // width thusfar. For our example purposes, we're going
            // to record the default device offset versus all other
            // attached screens.
            defaultDeviceOffset = i; // Mostly meaningless; sample purposes only.
 
        DisplayMode dm = devices[i].getDisplayMode();
        Dimension d = new Dimension(dm.getWidth(), dm.getHeight());
        screens.add(d);
        totalWidth += dm.getWidth();
    }
}

By recording individual screens, our centerOnScreen method can now be performed on a screen-by-screen basis:

/**
 * Revised centerOnScreen.
 */
private void centerOnScreen ()
{
    // Center the window based upon the default device dimensions.
 
    Rectangle bounds = new Rectangle(0, 0, 0, 0);
    int widthSoFar = 0;
 
    for (int i = 0; i <= defaultDeviceOffset; i++) {
        widthSoFar += screens.get(i).getWidth();
    }
 
    bounds.x = (screens.get(i).getWidth() / 2) - (app.DEFAULT_WIDTH / 2) + widthSoFar;
    bounds.y = (screens.get(i).getHeight() / 2) - (app.DEFAULT_HEIGHT / 2);
    bounds.width = app.DEFAULT_WIDTH;
    bounds.height = app.DEFAULT_HEIGHT;
 
    shell.setBounds(bounds);
}

By collecting metrics from the GraphicsEnvironment singleton, we’ve established what 1) the default device dimensions and and 2) have established code that will automatically correct for centering the application on the default device regardless of whether it is to the left or right of the other monitor or monitors.

Some Improvements

I want to keep this article short, so I’ll offer some suggestions for further improvements.

• If you wanted to restore the window position after it has been closed and restarted, just record the current window boundaries. Assuming monitor positions don’t change between launches, the application will restart from the last position it was closed at.
• It would be trivial to examine the window positions just prior to restoring the previous session to determine if it will be drawn within the boundaries of the desktop. You could either examine each screen individually (more accurate) or by gathering the desktop boundaries regardless of display (less code, less accurate). The best option is certainly to compare the window’s last position with the dimensions and structure of the probed screen devices. You can correct for changes in resolution, missing monitors, and a few other unexpected situations.
• This example only corrects for the most common scenario where desktop monitors are side-by-side. This is the default on Windows without 3rd party software and is generally a safe assumption. For platforms using Xorg (or similar), individual monitors can be to the left, right, top, or bottom of the primary display. NVIDIA’s drives provide fairly fine-grained control over monitor positioning, so if you’re targeting a multi-monitor environment under *nix, you may wish to do further testing and examine window positions based on height.
• This code can easily be adapted to Swing.
• While the sample code won’t work out of the box with JFace, it shouldn’t be too difficult to modify the sample code so it’ll work. Be sure to use getShell() to obtain window locations and dimensions but be mindful that this will probably break if you try to access the shell object during a close action. I’ll be making another post to demonstrate one possible solution.

Should you find bugs or would like to offer corrections to the example code in this article, please feel free to post. Obviously, corrections or suggestions that extend beyond the spirit of the code won’t be included. If you would like to offer criticism, please post full code snippets (even if you’re copying part of what I’ve written in this article) for clarity; should someone new to Java come across my blog, you would be doing them a fantastic service by limiting the amount of vertical scrolling necessary to read the example code and your critiques. :)

I waive all rights to the code in this article and hereby place it into the public domain.