Monday 30 December 2013

Window Snapper

Many programs have a nice dividers in their GUI - and you can usually drag the divider to resize the panels on either side. I've often been a little frustrated when resizing windows to tile them to fill the screen. Perhaps a Word document on the left, a PDF in the upper right, and email in the lower right. It was quite tedious, and because of that I didn't do it often, and I feel this slightly diminished the power of windows. So I wrote an AutoHotkey script and now I have what I wanted.

To use it, while the script is running, you can right-button drag window borders, and the script will move all neighbouring window edges at the same time. The script will grab window borders within 10 pixels (configurable) of the border/s you are right-button dragging. It also assumes a seven pixel wide window resize border, but that's also configurable at the top of the script. You can resize from edges or corners - giving you lots of power when resizing windows.

The most common use-case I have is with just two windows positioned with Win+Left and Win+Right (like explained here). With this script you can resize both windows effortlessly.

Here's an example of it in action:
 I can resize all five windows with one right-button drag, in the area where the four window corners meet in the middle of the screen. If I drag towards the upper right, I can get something like this:
 And things like this are possible too, but unsnapping window edges like I've done below with the left and right can be a little fiddly. I could potentially add something like Ctrl+Right-Click to only resize windows actually near the mouse...
Please have a go with the window snapper script. Please let me know what you think after using it!

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