I’ve generally loved the move from multiple machines to a single laptop (that I plug in to an external monitor when I’m at my desk). A minor hassle that I have to deal with a few times a day is resizing windows that have been “adjusted” when I unplugged from my monitor.
For example, my terminal often goes from this:

to this:

I found that in BBEdit you can hit Cmd+/ to restore a window to it’s expected size. I then discovered that Terminal.app has a “Return to Default Size” item under the Window menu. A quick addition in the Keyboard prefs:

and I can now use Cmd+/ to fix my Terminal.app window size as well.
Or, you can use TotalTerminal and never have that problem again. 🙂
Alternately, try iTerm2: http://www.iterm2.com/
The “bigger picture” for me on this was that this feature is available in multiple apps. Look for it, create shortcuts where they can save you time.
Try Moom. It allows you to setup preset custom layouts using multiple apps. It also has a setting to automatically trigger when switching between displays.
It by no means is a perfect solution, but I find it very handy for the specific situation described above.
I’ve tried a handful of these, but found that overall I didn’t get that much benefit from them.
[…] started the following post back in August of 2011; Sean’s comment on my previous post prompted me to dig it up. Now that I’m back to using a laptop full time, […]