Reset external displays macos monterey

reset_display_montaray.md

Reset external display configurations in macos Monterey

Background

I had the issue where a display reported a supported resolution that was actually not supported. This caused macos to get stuck in a loop where macos would try to connect to the monitor, succeed. Only to have the monitor disconnect since it did not support the resolution. This made it impossible to manually change the resolution since macos only shows the settings if the display is connected.

After a bunch of googling and trial and error I solved it with the following workaround:

1. Open terminal
2. go to /Library/Preferences
3. run sudo plutil -convert xml1 com.apple.windowserver.displays.plist to be able to edit the plist containing display configurations.
4. run (if you have vscode as editor installed) sudo code com.apple.windowserver.displays.plist
5. remove the unwanted configurations that are causing the issue.
6. save file, when asked for permission SUDO the mf to make the file save.
7. run sudo plutil -convert binary1 com.apple.windowserver.displays.plist to convert the setting back.
8. restart machine.
9. Old broken configs should be gone.

Hope this will help some poor soul in search of answers ;)!

Peace! //tveitan

Thank you so much for this. I ran in the exact same issue. After about 2h of trying out different things and googling around, following these steps did the trick. I was almost at the point of reinstalling MAC OS... Thank you!

Great! Also tried al sort of things like connecting the display with both thunderbolt and hdmi - no go. Ii removed all configs from com.apple.windowserver.displays.plist and rebooted → back in the game!
I guess one could simply delete the com.apple.windowserver.displays.plist as root as well - did not try that though.