[tomsem]

I had forgotten that Monterey lets you use the display of a second Mac as an extended display for a ‘primary’ one (AirPlay to Mac I think). I’d been using Luna Display for this, which works with pre Monterey macOS and older Macs running Monterey, but it has gotten a little unstable of late, and does not play nice with Universal Control yet.

So I’ve started to use it with my MacBook Pro (work machine) and iMac (personal machine) as extended display. It is working well, but it seems that to re-gain control of the iMac, I either need to go into Displays preferences on the MacBook Pro, or put it to sleep; there doesn’t seem to be a way do disconnect from the iMac side of things (option+command+Eject puts the display to sleep — it does turn off display — but it remains as a useless extended display for the MBP).

If I sleep the MPB, it disconnects from the iMac and I have to go back in to Displays and turn it back on.

Luna Display is a little more ‘automatic’, you can leave the host app running and start and stop the secondary app as desired. But it’s not enough of a plus for me to stick with it, except when I want to use it with an older Mac (which is not going to be very often).

There’s probably some way to script the extended display connect/disconnect to make it more convenient, but I haven’t been able to discover one.

[update, day 2: it really is no big deal to connect and disconnect, especially if I leave Displays panel open. Performance is at least as good as Luna Display and UC lets me do stuff on my iPad Pro using full size keyboard and trackpad. It all works great.]