I have a MacBook Air (Retina) 2018 and the LG 5K Ultrafine Monitor.
Half the time I have the monitor connected, with the laptop lid closed, to use the large screen. The other half of the time, I unplug the monitor and just use the laptop screen.
When working on just the laptop I like all my apps to be full-screen, and I swap between them using keyboard shortcuts in Keyboard Maestro. When using the monitor, I prefer them to be windowed on the main desktop.
But, it is a major pain having to manually adjust each app, every time I change. Is anyone aware of any utility to automate this? I have looked at Moom and Stay, but they don’t seem to recognise full-screen apps and will only remember and restore apps that are windowed.
KM would not do this? I mean: you could create this setup in KM and have a keyboard shortcut create the window options you want I think? So one for the external monitor and one for laptop screen?
WorkspacePro might do this. It doesn’t support MATLAB, so I didn’t try it further.
Hi John,
Unfortunately WorkspacePro will launch all the apps I might need, but it doesn’t manage Spaces.
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Hi,
Yes, I think you are right, KM could do this for me. But, having had a quick look, it is going to be a fairly complicated series of macros, one to activate a particular app, followed by one to switch in or out of full screen, then another to set the correct size if the app is to be windowed.
Certainly doable, but I was rather hoping for a simple utility that already existed. 
I don’t know any that can do it on multiple monitors. Moom can do a snapshot, but has difficulty doing it across monitors. I think KM is your best bet.
Thank you Shruggle,
Have already tried Stay, but again, it appears unable to identify and store/restore full-screen to windowed. It can only remember and restore a windowed app to another windowed position, not to full-screen.
It may be an inherent ‘issue’ with macOS, although I am having some success using KM.