I’ve used RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) for years to work on multiple systems simultaneously.

But one thing that’s bugged me for a while is that, with multiple monitors, you have basically an “All or One” situation.

There’s a nice checkbox on the RDP configuration form that allows you to “Use all monitors”.

But that’s all you get. If you have 3 or more monitors, there’s no way to specify only 2 of them to use for the RDP connection.

Or is there?

Turns out, Scott Hanselman turned up an hidden configuration element for RDP connections that does exactly this. Read up about it here.

The gist is to setup an RDP connection as normal, turn on the “Use All Monitors” option you see above, and save the connection.

Then, use a editor (Notepad will do just fine), and edit the *.RDP file you just created.

It’s a plain text file with a pretty straightforward format.

Somewhere in it, you should see:

use multimon:i:1

Just add another line like below:

selectedmonitors:s:0,2

where the 0(zero) and the 2 are the monitors that you want to use.

In my case, 0 is my primary and 2 is my leftmost monitor. You can find the monitors numbers by checking your display properties.

I’ve tried a few terminal apps out there (like Terminals), but, unfortunately, none of them seem aware of this either.