15

Sometimes I'm on a 27" screen with a crazy resolution of 2560x1440 that allows me to put windows on each corner and still have, essentially, four 1280x720 windows, which is great, but tedious, since Windows only includes shortcuts for putting windows to the sides, i.e. via Win+ and Win+. (I recall some time ago my company's desktop had something like NVidia Desktop Manager that might have allowed docking to corners, but the software was buggy and unstable.) So the first part of my question is: Is there a program for docking windows to corners via keyboard shortcuts?

Of more interest to me, personally, though, would be a program that would furthermore allow me to configure the size of windows docked to each corner:

A window separated in 4 parts

This is because I don't always have the luxury of working on a 2560x1440 screen and evenly sized quadrants would be impractical to use on lower resolutions, but, workable if some windows could be proportioned larger than others. For example, in the above illustration, I might place Visual Studio on the "main," upper-left dock, have a debugger up on the upper-right dock, have a browser window open on the lower-left dock, and have a console or terminal open on the smallest dock.

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.


Edit

I found that Moom does this for Macs!—so the concept exists...

Moon Tooltip Windows Editor

1
  • Ooooh, Moom is cool.
    – user46
    Commented Feb 5, 2014 at 18:06

4 Answers 4

12

WinSplit Revolution does exactly what you want and pretty much nothing more. It lets you dock windows to any position on your screen using Ctrl + Alt + (numpad key).

There's a simple GUI that lets you customize window positions using four variables:

  1. horizontal position of the window's top left corner
  2. vertical position of the window's top left corner
  3. window height
  4. window width

You can specify multiple options for each key on the numpad, too.

By default, the 7, 9, 1 and 3 keys are assigned to the corners of the screen. I use this for a dual-monitor setup where one screen is 2560x1600 and the other is 1920x1080, and the program is smart enough to know the difference in sizes and where the monitor borders are.

The software is slightly buggy in my experience. Sometimes it won't allow certain windows to be certain sizes, or it'll skip one of your entries for a certain key combination if you have multiple entries configured. I haven't found a pattern to this weirdness, but resetting all the rules seems to help, and unless you have a dozen entries mapped to a particular numkey, it's not all that bothersome.


Screenshot

WinSplit Revolution Layout Settings

8
  • The description you gave was so perfect for WinSplit Revolution that I actually briefly wondered if you were trying to get it as an answer.
    – Pops
    Commented Feb 5, 2014 at 19:40
  • Haha, thank you very much. I briefly came across WinSplit but didn't realize it was configurable to that degree. I'd like to edit your answer to include a screenshot—I hope that's alright. Commented Feb 5, 2014 at 19:41
  • Also worth mentioning, WinSplit Revolution allows you to map any key combination not used by Windows to any window action (not just Ctrl+Alt+[numkey]). This was important to me because my ThinkPad, for whatever reason, has no NumPad—even via Fn. I've currently mapped Ctrl+Win+[arrows|PgUp|PgDn] to suit my needs. Commented Feb 5, 2014 at 19:44
  • Huh, I didn't even know about the non-numpad options. I always make sure I get keyboards with numpads, so I never had to think about it.
    – Pops
    Commented Feb 5, 2014 at 19:47
  • 2
    Bad news guys – Winsplit Revolution has been discontinued Commented Sep 13, 2014 at 3:26
3

I have been using AquaSnap for a while and it works for me. It is very cheap to purchase. And I don't work for them. It has numerous options for snapping to sides, corners and to other windows. With all hotkeys easily assignable.

1
0

Since you already mentioned Moom for Mac OS, let me refer to a similar tool for Windows: Divvy

Pro:

  • it works on Windows
  • it has configurable keyboard shortcuts
  • it's a commercial tool at ~14 USD

Con:

On my machine, it works best when I click the taskbar icon. However, that requires long mouse moves. I'd prefer being able to e.g. middle-click on a title bar of an application for the resizing dialog to appear. Unfortunately that's not implemented.

0

On Windows 10+, the free Microsoft PowerToys includes one tool called FancyZones that does exactly what you need.

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.