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posted @ Thursday, December 20, 2007 10:42 AM
I've just fallen in love with
GridMove, which I found during my quarterly visit to
Scott Hanselman's Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows. Scott's list is a great resource for finding useful stuff, but there is so much on there it is a bit overwhelming. So when I feel the need to try something new, I'll head back there and pick a utility that sounds useful and give it a whirl. GridMove was yesterday's candidate.
I have two monitors that are different sizes. Why? Because I saw a good deal on a nice widescreen monitor, went for it, and added it next to my 4:3 monitor. This can make it a pain when moving windows because your windows are typically sized for the different aspect ratios, and you have to resize when moving across monitors to fit into the new ratio. GridMove makes it easy.
GridMove is pretty easy to get used to. Basically, it comes with some custom templates that divide your screen up into grid squares. The division is invisible until you trigger a "grid move," which can be done in several ways, including dragging a window, using hot keys, etc. As soon as you trigger a move for a selected window, the grid shows up, and you can snap your window into any area of your grid:
I found using the mouse controls for GridMove a bit clunky, and they sometimes can cause unwanted results. Last night when I was playing a full screen game, I did something that triggered GridMove, and the next thing I knew my game was cropped and only showing inside a tiny grid block on my screen, and I could find no way to fix it. Had to quit and restart. Thankfully I was not in any peril in the game at that time. :)
The mouse controls for GridMove are highly customizable, so if you like click-drag I'm sure you can get it to work for you. I disabled all the mouse controls and just use the built-in hotkeys. Now, I can just hit Windows-G and see my grid, with numbers for each grid area. Pressing the desired number moves my window into that grid location. Voila! With simple keystrokes, I can send my windows to whatever monitor I want, and sized perfectly to the area I want to use.
To do this, I had to create a custom grid template, which was also easy. Using an existing template as a reference, you can pretty easily segment your monitors any way you want, and each monitor can have it's own specialized grid. This enabled me to customize it for my awkward aspect ratio pairing.
GridMove is open source, but appreciates donations! They'll be getting one from me!
Also: It doesn't explicitly state that it supports Vista, but it is working fine on my Vista machine.