Windows PowerToys

I have a 34” 16:10 screen, which in practical terms means it’s very wide. I can fit at least three full size A4 pages on it comfortably. Sadly, Windows built-in features for managing… windows are not meant for this kind of screen. For example, it’s easy to make a window take a half of the screen, or a quarter, but for my screen that would be too long. What I want 90% of the time is for it to take a third of the screen, so that I can fit three windows. Another useful scheme is to split it 1:2, so that one program goes into a wider area, and a supplementary program goes into a narrow part of the screen.

There are multiple commercial applications to manage the screen space, but I have found the ones I tested to be glitchy enough to be unhelpful. So I was struggling with managing windows until I discovered Windows PowerToys:

TODO add screenshots

They have FancyZones which not only worked well for me so far, but also are quite well-designed in a certain aspect. I had previously noticed, that when I manually expand a window to take full-length of the screen vertically, it’s quite difficult to resize it (to make it smaller) later, because I need to grab the lower boundary which is at the edge of the screen. The FancyZones do not maximise windows to full height of the screen, they leave just a bit of space at either side. This does not reduce the useful space much, but it helps a lot to manipulate the size of the window. Obviously, the person who designed this application had the same issue that I did and their solution is brilliant.