How to save and reopen your whole working setup
Opening the same eight things every morning is a task a computer should be doing, and most of it genuinely can.
Short answer
Save the list — the folders, the applications, the pages — under a name, and open the name. Restoring exact window positions is a harder and much less portable problem, and it is worth separating the two.
Two problems that get confused
What to open. The project folder, the editor, the terminal in the right directory, three specific pages, the design file. This is a list, it is portable, and it is easy.
Where to put it. Window positions and sizes across however many screens are currently attached. This is much harder, depends on the operating system’s window management, and breaks the moment the screen arrangement changes.
Almost all of the daily benefit is in the first one, and the second is where the effort goes. Do the first.
The list
A named set of things to open — client-work, writing, admin — where each entry is a folder, an application, a command, or a URL.
The value is not really the seconds saved. It is that “start work on X” becomes one action instead of eight, and the eight are the part where you get distracted. It also means the machine holds the definition of a task rather than you having to remember what belongs to it.
Dry-run it before it opens anything. A workspace that launches eleven things is not something you want to discover has a bad path halfway through.
What your machine already does
macOS: System Settings → Desktop & Dock → “Close windows when quitting an application”, turned off, restores an app’s windows on relaunch. Separately, Spaces plus assigning applications to a desktop gets you most of the arrangement. Stage Manager groups windows if it suits you.
Windows: Win+arrow snapping, Snap Layouts on Windows 11, and virtual desktops with Win+Ctrl+D. Windows 11 also remembers window arrangements per monitor configuration, which handles the dock-and-undock case surprisingly well.
If those are enough, they are enough. What they do not do is treat “the set of things for this project” as a nameable object.
When the screens change
This is the part nobody has a good answer for, and it is worth understanding why.
A saved layout is coordinates on a particular arrangement of displays. Undock the laptop and the arrangement is gone: a window at x=2400 is now off-screen entirely. Most systems respond by piling everything onto the remaining display.
The honest solution is not to restore the coordinates but to re-solve the layout: given these windows, with these relative priorities, and these screens, what is the best arrangement now — and which windows do not fit and have to be dropped or stacked. That is a genuinely different operation from restoring, and it needs to be able to tell you what it gave up and why.
Keyboard shortcuts across several tools
A related problem in the same area: once you use several applications with configurable bindings, they collide. Two things both claim Ctrl+Shift+P, and one of them silently loses.
Worse are the chords the operating system or the terminal has already taken, which fail in a way that looks like the application ignoring you.
Checking a set of binding files against each other, and against the chords the platform reserves, turns that from a mystery into a list.
The programs for this
- DeskPilot does the list.
saverecords a named set of URLs, commands and paths;openopens them, with--dry-runto see what it would do first. - WorkspaceForge does the re-solving. Given a layout and a screen topology it plans where every window goes, and
refittakes a layout that was made for one arrangement and works out the best equivalent on another. - DeskScene is the same problem stated honestly for the case where things genuinely will not fit: your twelve-pane trading layout on a hotel laptop. It says what to give up, and why, and can draw the result.
- WindowDeck settles the keybinding argument: check several binding sets against each other and against curated tables of the chords Windows and macOS reserve, and
explaintells you who currently owns a given chord.
Free while we are in preview, one file each, Windows and Mac.
What none of these do
They do not move your windows. Positioning another application’s windows requires accessibility permissions and platform-specific window-management APIs, and these programs do not ask for that access.
What they do is the planning and the launching — work out the arrangement, tell you what fits, open the set. The moving, on macOS, is a job for Rectangle or Moom; on Windows, for FancyZones.