menus appear on wrong monitor

[prettygoodnotbad]

When working on dual monitors the left hand side menu and most of the tooltips and pop up menus appear on my macbook's screen not on my external monitor. This started happening fairly recently, it's been maybe a month it's acting like this. It's very annoying and I can't seem to find what I can do to help. I found a post suggesting to reset to default layout, this didn't help. Any ideas?

[mohammed.aliTDPXK · Accepted solution]

Hello @prettygoodnotbad ,

Can you please restart Fusion and see if this resolves your issue?

[g-andresen]

Hi,

slide it to the left side of the main display until a green vertical line appears.

günther

[sasikanth.kollipara]

Hi @prettygoodnotbad Thanks for using Fusion, Like @mohammed.aliTDPXK  mentioned please do restart Fusion for resetting the menus. if in case it didn't reset you can do it manually from View menu.. 

If my post answers your question, please click the "Accept Solution" button. This helps everyone find answers more quickly!

Regards,

Sasi

[prettygoodnotbad]

so as I mentioned in my original post resetting the default layout does nothing, and the idea of sliding the menu until you I see a green line also does not work because this assumes that the problem is due to the menu being undocked, which it isn't.

Restarting seems to work right now, I had tried that last week and I thought I remembered it not working. Either way this is a less then ideal solution, it requires me to save and close all my open designs which takes time. I also keep having to restart because my track pad constantly stops working and autodesk seems to also only offer restarting as a solution. 

[mohammed.aliTDPXK]

Hello @prettygoodnotbad ,

Unfortunately we don't a solution right now for the wrong menus, but as I mentioned, workaround is restarting Fusion helps in getting this in place.

I have noted this issue and will get back to the concerned team on how we can fix this.

And regarding the trackpad, we have few known items which our team is working, but I can't tell you the fix timeline for now.

Thanks!

[andrew.schlaikjer]

This manual "Reset to Default Layout" action did not resolve this issue for me: I'm running MacOS 11.6.1 on Apple M1 MBP, Fusion 360 2.0.11894.

[janikmdietz]

Hi, I am having the same issue on my MacBooks. Restarting unfortunately only works sometimes (and is very annoying). Resetting the view as instructed does not do anything for me. 

Additionally, when working in a different application (Fusion being minimized) the menus are "floating" above whatever other application I have open at that moment. There seems to be some deeper issue with the menus being treated as something like a separate application style window that can be separated from Fusion .. even when properly docked to the side of the Fusion window.

I am experiencing this issue both on my older 13'' MacBook Pro from 2012 as well as the latest 14'' model from 2021.

[Steven.alias]

Docking the menu bar to the side (looking for the green vertical bar to indicate docking) works temporarily. As soon as I switch to a different application such as Safari then return, the menu bar is disappeared. I have to use expose to explicitly select the menu bar, then dock it again, until I need to switch to another application. Buying extra monitors or quitting the application and coming back in repeatedly is not a solution, it's a problem.

[Phil.E]

(internal reference ticket FUS-107804)

[janikmdietz]

Are they any updates towards resolving this? 

As stated before I am having the same issues on a 14'' M1 MBP since I bought it around New Year. It's super frustrating and quite often renders the application pretty much useless. Things that usually take half a second and one click now repeatedly take 20-30s to figure out where my menus went. Resetting, restarting etc. all rarely helps (I tried .. many times). 
The main issue is that menus randomly start appearing on other plugged in monitors behind applications that are open there. Sometimes you can find them through the macOS "App Exposé" but this is hugely impractical. Sometimes this goes as far as for example I want to do an extrusion from a sketch but the extrusion menu doesn't appear. I do App Exposé and and I find it on some other monitor. Then I click into the menu to enter a value/set my plane etc. and it immediately disappears again. So in effect for everything I set - the menus just disappear and have to be "found" and dragged into the correct monitor again ..

Would love to hear the state of things on this in terms of fixing. 

[Phil.E]

There is no progress on fixing this, it's a technical limitation at this time. I've asked for an update from the team responsible for this aspect of the application.

Apologies for any inconvenience. There are only workarounds at this time, such as launching Fusion on your primary monitor, running Fusion in full screen, and not using any macOS "spaces" or extra desktops. Do any of those measures help?

[janikmdietz]

Thanks for the quick answer.

To be honest, the measures you described do not really help. I am running Fusion in full screen, however other Mac "spaces" as you describe and also an external display are quite integral to most of my workflows. Not being able to use those features limit me so dramatically that it's hard to even call it a work-around. It's a bit like "oh your car can still drive, just please don't go faster than 15mph". 

I very much hope that the technical limitation you mentioned does not extend to the apple silicon native version you are working on, it would be quite frustrating to see that still being an issue there. 

Thanks though for the update request to the responsible team, I'll be happy to hear anything new. 

[Steven.alias]

Running the application in a single monitor (M1 MacBook Pro, no attached external displays) as well as running in full screen do not solve the issue. The loss of menu occurs in those use cases as well.

I will try not using spaces, but be advised you are essentially asking your users to dismantle what's agreeably already a handicapped workflow (i.e., ,spaces isn't optimal but it gets the job done. Now we have to remove it to use Fusion 360). That's tying our hands behind our backs in terms of usability and multi-tasking. We do not use Fusion 360 in a vacuum, there are external applications at play here (e.g., specifications documents, images, etc). If we cannot use external displays and have to turn of spaces, then Fusion 360 might as will have its own stand-alone laptop, or I need to use Fusion 360 in a virtualized/remote environment to circumvent this limitation.

[Steven.alias]

Has Autodesk been able to reproduce this and understand the conditions that cause this? I ask because I don't feel like I'm doing anything out of the norm. So it causes me to wonder if anyone at Autodesk experiences this? Like your staff, consultants, etc. How does this not happen to them? Are they all running single desktop full screen without spaces and it's just a common thing at Autodesk to use a laptop that way, or is there just one thing we're doing that we can avoid? I feel like this should be a bigger issue because it seems like the program is incompatible with Mac OS in some respects, doesn't it seem that way? So for no one at Autodesk to say, "Hey look I can't even test the new MacOS build of Fusion 360 because I cannot find my menus" leave me flummoxed as to what we are doing wrong.

[Phil.E]

For the record, I test on:

• 27" imac, no additional monitor
• M1 mini + 27" external monitor
• 13 MBP, no additional monitor

I have zero issues using Fusion, outlook, chrome, and a myriad of test tools simultaneously, in this display setup.

[Steven.alias]

So it sounds like maybe there's a difference my computer and yours, the configuration. Is there something I can send you that can help illuminate a possible origin or something else to troubleshoot? If you don't need to turn off spaces, disconnect monitors, and compromise your desktop experience, then there must be something else causing the issue. I'm willing to provide any logs, application lists, process lists, etc. to try to identify the issue if it cannot be reproduced. I'll even jump into a meeting with you and let you drive my laptop to see if you can discover anything. 

[andrew.schlaikjer]

Phil, thanks for sharing your test configurations! Sounds as though you don't have a test configuration which relates most directly to the reported issue: Laptop screen plus secondary monitor. Consider adding this config to your routine.

[Phil.E]

Thanks for the advice!

[prettygoodnotbad]

So as op I figured I would chime in here. I just wanted to second what Andrew is saying this topic is about running my MacBook pro with a second monitor and using both screens. This is a very common and important setup for many users I'm sure. It sounds to me look Steven is getting the issue also on a single screen setup, I cannot vouch for that. 

Anyway this combined with the macbook trackpad switching off when monitor goes to sleep (something I have also been told there is no solution to) make fusion kind of a nightmare. I wish Autodesk would take these topics seriously.