The usual way to move a window is the mouse: reach for it, find the title bar, hold it and drag. Each drag takes a few seconds and a little attention, and the window lands somewhere slightly different each time.
Windows 11 offers keys too. Win with an arrow snaps a window, but the result is hard to predict. What a key does depends on where the window already is, so the same key gives different results. The keys cannot be reassigned. The layouts stop at halves and quarters. After each snap, Windows asks you to choose a window for the other side, which is one more decision when you only wanted to move one window. macOS only recently gained basic tiling.
Finding the next window costs more. You hover over the app on the taskbar and wait for the thumbnails to appear. If several windows of the same app are open, you then pick through small titles and near-identical previews, many times a day.
I give each move I make often its own key. The window lands in the same place every time, wherever it started, so the move becomes muscle memory.
Place any window with one key
One key moves and resizes the current window to a set area of either monitor: a half, a corner, or the full screen. There is no dragging and no aiming. On Windows, Dual Monitor Tool does this. On a Mac, Rectangle does. Both are free and open source.
Swap windows between monitors
When two windows take turns as the main one, one key swaps them between the primary and secondary monitors. Dual Monitor Tool does this too.
Arrange two windows at once
Most of the time I work in one app, then need another beside it. My own AutoHotkey script, Capsy, handles both cases.
- Side by side. I go to the second app and press one key. It moves to the right half, and the window I was just using comes back on the left, both sized exactly.
- Across monitors. One key sends the current window to the other monitor and brings the previous window to this one.
Go straight to the window I need
With many windows open, and often several files in the same app, finding the right one is the slowest step. Switcheroo fixes it. One key opens a list of open windows, I type a few letters of the window or file name, and I am there.
A taskbar that doesn’t make me wait
Taskbar thumbnails are slow to appear and take up space, and choosing between them is visual hunting. Two Windhawk mods change that. Disable Taskbar Thumbnails shows a plain list of window titles instead, and Taskbar Thumbnail Reorder lets me put that list in the order I want.
Connecting the apps
- Dual Monitor Tool. Set the areas and the swap key in its options. Back up its settings file,
DmtSettings.xml, so the setup survives a new machine. I chose it over Gridy, which has fewer shortcuts and cannot move full-screen windows. - Capsy. Download it from its GitHub page. The article on why I built it includes a recording of the window moves.
- Switcheroo. Set its key in the tray icon’s options.
Choose your own keys, ones you can press without thinking.