Window Peeler

I've said before that AutoHotkey is a great program that every Windows users should have and use. Here's yet another use I found for it to make my (and yours) life easier. Have you ever had two full-screen windows on the same monitor and wanted to switch between them quickly? I encounter that situation regularly. With two or three monitors, I use one in portrait orientation for email and viewing documents, and the others for everything else. To switch between windows, the Task Bar, Alt+Tab and Windows+Tab are great, but when I have 20+ windows open, it can take a fair bit of fiddling and time to switch between email and documents on the same monitor. I wanted a better solution. So I wrote this script (download):

;;;; Window Peeler - Show next window under mouse pointer
#NoEnv ;; Standard prelude
#SingleInstance force
SendMode Input
SetWorkingDir %A_ScriptDir%

;; Pick one of your mouse buttons (XButton1 = Back, XButton2 = Forward, MButton = middle button, LButton = left button, etc.) and use it here:
XButton1::
  MouseGetPos,,, WinId
  WinSet, Bottom,, ahk_id %WinId%
  ;MouseGetPos,,, WinId
  ;WinActivate, ahk_id %WinId%
Return

It moves the window under the cursor to the back when the back button is pressed on your mouse (assuming you have that button). That leaves the next window down on top! The two commented out lines of code activate that window, but I like it without that because it makes the script run quicker. It's a very simple script.

To make it trigger on another combination, for example Control+RightMouseButton, replace XButton1:: with ^RButton:: (^ is for Control).

P.S. Note that mouse software may interfere with the Back and Forward mouse button events. In the Logitech software, I had to set the action for that button to Other: Generic Button.

What do you think? Please leave a comment.