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Is there a way to prevent the second monitor to turn black when an application in the first monitor is made full screen? I have this problem in Mac.

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    there's not enough info in your question. What monitors? What connection type? What Mac and OS version? Please update.
    – SaxDaddy
    Sep 30, 2015 at 17:11

1 Answer 1

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Yes there is (And if you use a Mac, I also believe that there is enough information on the issue to answer the question).

Just go to System Preferences > Mission Control and check the option that says "Displays have separate Spaces".

Separate Spaces

That solves the issue on one monitor going black when there is an app on fullscreen mode in the other.

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    Note that relogging is required for this to work. "Requires log out" is visible on the screenshot you're linking to, but not in the settings dialog I'm actually getting.
    – Morawski
    Apr 8, 2016 at 9:41
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    Note that turning on "Displays have separate Spaces" prevents application windows from spanning more than one screen. You cannot have that and useful full screen on multiple monitors at the same time. OS X's multi screen/monitor/desktop and full screen implementation choices are fundamentally broken. A window manager add-on that does "manual" vs native full screen like Divvy is a reasonable workaround if the app doesn't have "special" full screen behavior you need.
    – Metaxis
    Jul 25, 2018 at 1:08
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    My Firefox on macOS 10.14.6 will full-screen only on one monitor/display even if Displays have separate Spaces is unchecked (and I prefer to keep it unchecked per the above issues that @Metaxis mentions above). No other web-browser can do this, on my system anyway. Sep 22, 2020 at 23:49
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    I do not really see this as a solution. I do not want to have separate spaces on different displays. I just do not want my 2nd screen go black if the first one has fullscreen app.
    – scarface
    Mar 20, 2022 at 20:55
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    Seven years later and this is still an issue, are there any solutions to this besides enabling "Displays have separate spaces"?
    – Alex S
    Dec 4, 2022 at 18:17

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