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Building and testing

Running from source

Requirements:

  • Windows 10 or 11
  • Python 3.9+
  • pip install pywin32 (required), pillow (optional, nicer tray icon)

Any graphics card. EDID is a VESA standard, not a vendor feature, and displays are read through standard Windows APIs — EnumDisplayDevices, QueryDisplayConfig, and the cached EDID in the registry. No vendor SDK.

pip install -r requirements.txt
python phantommonitor.py --list
python phantommonitor.py

PhantomMonitor.vbs starts it without a console window.

Tests

python test_phantommonitor.py

138 checks. Stop the tray app first — it rescues the test fixtures mid-assertion, and the suite refuses to run while it is live.

The tests drive real windows on your real displays, and pick the smallest non-primary display as the stand-in for a phantom, so they run on any multi-monitor machine. They also start the program as a subprocess and require it to reach the end of its startup sequence: everything else is pure logic, and a startup crash once passed the entire suite while the program could not run at all.

Building the binaries

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File build\build.ps1
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File build\build_installer.ps1

The first produces build\dist\PhantomMonitor.exe via PyInstaller and smoke tests it. The second needs Inno Setup and produces PhantomMonitor-Setup.exe.

Keep APP_VERSION in phantommonitor.py and AppVersion in build\installer.iss in step.

Older Windows

Built and tested on Windows 10. Everything it uses — SetWinEventHook, ClipCursor, EnumDisplayDevices, registry EDID — predates Windows 7, so it should run there. Two things degrade rather than fail:

  • Per-monitor DPI awareness needs 8.1+. On 7 it falls back to system DPI.
  • QueryDisplayConfig needs 7+. Without it, display names come from EnumDisplayDevices instead.

If you try it on 7 or 8.1, please open an issue either way.

How this was built

Written by Raymond Pierce, co-authored with Claude Opus 5, driven by real hardware: a Denon AVR, a Yamaha HTR-4063, a Toshiba TV and three displays. Most of what is in these docs was measured rather than assumed, and several confident claims had to be withdrawn when testing contradicted them.

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