Spanky's Place

One of the nice features about the multiple-client design (first introduced in R5) of Lotus Notes is that each client "remembers" where you last left it. When you close any of the "special" Notes Clients (Admin, Designer, or Help); the next time you launch that client it will appear in the same window location and with the same size that you closed it. This is nice, because it allows you to set up your working environment in a manner best suited to you. However, as with most cool UI things, the Law of Unintended Consequences applies. Now, to be fair, Notes isn't the only application that suffers from this problem -other windows applications have very similar issues. But this post is about Lotus Notes.

If you, like me, use multiple monitors then you've probably set up your Notes environment with different clients on different monitors. My laptop has an absolutely incredible 17" LED display (1920 x 1200), and this is where I normally run my Designer client. I use a secondary 19" wide-screen monitor, and that is where I normally position my normal Notes, Admin, and Help Clients. This works well for me, and helps me to operate at peak efficiency. That is, until I take my laptop elsewhere (such as a client's office, or coffee shop, or whatever). If I launch my Admin or Help client they start just fine, and I can see that they are running by checking the task bar or the task manager, but they are nowhere to be found. They are in fact running, but because of their "remember where I was" feature, they render in a non accessible area of my UI. My Designer client doesn't suffer from this issue because I normally keep it positioned on my laptop monitor.

The culprit (and the fix) can be found in your notes.ini file. It is the XXXXWINDOWSIZEWIN parameter; where XXXX is replaced by ADMIN, HELP, or DESIGN. This parameter specifies the position and size of the particular client:
XXXXWINDOWSIZEWIN= TopLeft_Xpos, TopLeft_Ypos, Pixels_Width, Pixels_Height In windows, the X-Y coordinates are a little but funky. On the primary monitor, 0,0 is the top left pixel. Numbers increase going from top left to bottom right. The X-Y coordinates for additional monitors are controlled by the operating system, and based on the physical positioning of those monitors relative to the primary monitor. When configuring your system for spanning the display across multiple monitors you specify this positional relationship.

In my office my secondary monitor is set up physically above my laptop. This means that it's X-Y coordinates start with 0,0 at the bottom left, with X coords increasing and Y coords decreasing (going negative) going to top right. Which means that for me, the TopLeft_Ypos value for my ADMINWINDOWSIZEWIN and HELPWINDOWSIZEWIN notes.ini parameters will always be a negative number. Your coordinates will depend on how you have your monitors set up. The downside of this is that my Admin and Help clients are rendering in a negative Y coordinate space, which does not exist when I'm only using my laptop display. The solution is simple, if a bit of a hassle.

1. Close all Notes Clients
2. Open notes.ini in an editor
3. Change (or delete) the offending XXXXWINDOWSIZEWIN parameters
4. Save and close notes.ini
5. Launch Notes

Yes, it would be nice if Windows could/would auto detect and correct this issue. But until (if ever) this happens, at least this PIA solution will work.