Multi-monitor layout not saved: scale and position reset on Omarchy 4

You arrange your screens, set a scale, and it looks right. Then you reload, dock, undock, or reboot, and the layout is back where it started. On Omarchy 4 this is usually not Hyprland losing your config. It is Omarchy writing over it.

The fix

Checked on 4.0.4. The same steps apply to 4.0.0 through 4.0.3. On 3.x the file is monitors.conf and only step 5 applies, see the Quattro config page.

1. Get your real output names. Run hyprctl monitors all. Note the connector name (eDP-1, DP-2, HDMI-A-1), the mode you want, and the description string if you have two identical panels.

2. Open the file. Use Setup > Monitors in the Omarchy menu, which runs omarchy-launch-config-editor "$HOME/.config/hypr/monitors.lua".

3. Write one explicit rule per output, each on a single literal line, above the shipped catch-all. Keep the catch-all last so any screen you did not name still comes up:

   local omarchy_gdk_scale = 1
   local omarchy_monitor_scale = "auto"
   
   hl.env("GDK_SCALE", tostring(omarchy_gdk_scale))
   
   hl.monitor({ output = "DP-2", mode = "2560x1440@165", position = "0x0", scale = 1 })
   hl.monitor({ output = "HDMI-A-1", mode = "1920x1080@60", position = "auto-right", scale = 1 })
   hl.monitor({ output = "eDP-1", mode = "preferred", position = "auto-down", scale = 1.6 })
   
   hl.monitor({ output = "", mode = "preferred", position = "auto", scale = omarchy_monitor_scale })

4. Prefer relative positions. Use auto-right, auto-left, auto-up or auto-down rather than pixel coordinates unless every screen is at scale 1. Absolute coordinates are computed against logical pixels, so a 1080p screen at scale 1.25 is only 864 logical pixels tall and a neighbour pinned at 0x1080 leaves a gap your cursor cannot cross. syskey8 worked the arithmetic out in discussion #8213.

5. Set GDK_SCALE to the nearest whole number of your largest monitor scale. GTK only honours integers, and apps already running keep the old value until you restart them.

6. Reload with hyprctl reload. Do not use hyprctl keyword monitor ... from a 3.x guide. Omarchy 4 loads Hyprland through Lua, and that call fails with keyword can't work with non-legacy parsers. Use eval.

7. From now on, change scale by editing the rule, not with the Display panel buttons or Super + /. Those call omarchy-hyprland-monitor-scaling, which is the source of most of the resets described below.

Verify it worked

Read the live state back and compare it to what you wrote:

hyprctl monitors all -j | jq -r '.[] | "\(.name) \(.width)x\(.height) scale=\(.scale) at \(.x)x\(.y) transform=\(.transform)"'

Then wait ten seconds and run it again. A docked laptop is re-checked every two seconds, so a layout that is going to be overwritten will change within that window. Check hyprctl configerrors for a silent parse failure, unplug and replug the external screen, and reboot once. If a scale keeps moving on its own, ~/.local/state/omarchy/monitor-scaling.log records every change the scaling tool made, including which process asked for it.

Why it happens

Three separate mechanisms in 4.0.x can write over your layout.

The scale tool persists to the wrong place. bin/omarchy-hyprland-monitor-scaling applies the new scale live with hyprctl eval, then tries to save it by rewriting either local omarchy_monitor_scale or the wildcard output = "" rule. Both are global. nico-kovacs showed in #6673 that setting a scale on one screen therefore changes the others within a second or two, because the file write itself triggers a config reload. If your file has explicit per-output rules instead, RonRayReed found in #8103 that the save silently does nothing, and Douda reported the same revert in #7242.

The clamshell watcher re-asserts the internal panel. omarchy-hyprland-monitor-watch runs omarchy-hyprland-monitor-clamshell on every monitor event, and every two seconds for as long as a laptop has an active external monitor. That script parses monitors.lua with sed. It matches only a rule written literally as output = "eDP-1", on one line. mkelk showed in #7084 that a desc: rule, or a rule split over several lines, is invisible to it, so it falls back to the catch-all’s scale and forces that onto the panel whenever the live value differs. On 4.0.0 a catch-all still at "auto" fell through further to a hardcoded 2. 4.0.1 stopped that, but the catch-all becomes a number the first time any scale button is pressed, and from then on an unmatched panel snaps back about a second after every change.

Position is never read from the catch-all. skoom21 documented in #7326 that the clamshell script’s read_monitor_position returns auto whenever it cannot find a connector-name rule for the internal panel, and that the live hyprctl eval inside the scale tool hardcodes position = "auto" as well. The watcher only re-applies position as a side effect of correcting the scale, so on a stock monitors.lua, which contains no per-output rule at all, a deliberate offset goes the moment the watcher decides the panel’s scale is wrong, and on every scale press regardless. reppiz saw the same rearrangement on 3.4.0 in #4785, so the position half predates Quattro.

One piece did get fixed. PR #7581 by fuchsblau merged on 2026-08-22 and shipped in 4.0.1 as “Leave an auto-scaled internal panel alone in clamshell recovery”. It makes the recovery step return early when the configured scale is not a number, which is the default "auto", and PedroMiguelInacio’s #6909 was closed minutes after it merged. The persistence PRs have not landed: #7437 was still open on 2026-09-16, and #8145 was closed unmerged on 2026-09-17 and folded into #12263, which is open.

If that did not work

You keyed a monitor by description. desc: is valid Hyprland syntax and Hyprland honours it, but the clamshell script does not. Give the internal panel a connector-name rule instead. mkelk’s reasoning in #7084 is that eDP numbering holds across hotplug and it is DP connectors that renumber, which is what desc: exists to survive. So use desc: for external screens if you need it and keep the internal panel literal.

You generated the rules with a Lua loop. In a comment on #8103, gfk reported that this makes things worse, because the shell parser finds no literal line and falls back to the catch-all on every monitor event and idle-wake. Keep at least the internal panel’s rule as one plain line.

Your monitors.lua is a symlink into a dotfiles repo. FCygan reported in #7625 that sed -i without --follow-symlinks replaces the symlink with a regular file the first time a scale button is pressed, so the repo quietly stops driving the config. Check with ls -l ~/.config/hypr/monitors.lua after any scale change.

Rotation comes back wrong after a reboot. YuseiRun reported in #7066 that a transform value in the config is present but not applied until you change it and change it back. That report is one machine, with transform set on the catch-all rule and the scale quoted as a string, and nobody else has confirmed it, so treat it as thin evidence rather than a confirmed pattern.

Nothing responds to the keyboard after your edit. A Lua error in monitors.lua aborts evaluation before the bindings load. See the nil global o page, and recover the shipped file with omarchy-refresh-config hypr/monitors.lua, which backs your version up first.

The screen comes back blank rather than misplaced. That is a different failure. Try suspend and resume or the dock notes.

Related

• Monitor layout lost after Quattro
• Fractional scaling looks blurry or huge
• Multi-monitor hardware notes
• Hyprland conf to Lua migration
• Omarchy manual: Monitors