Window Managment on Large Monitors
I have had a 24″ monitor at work for a while and recently bought myself a 24″ for use as a second monitor on my 17″ iMac at home. I really enjoy the extra screen real estate that a large monitor with a resolution of 1920×1200 provides. However most applications don’t really make good use of the massive screen real estate of a large LCD monitor e.g. web browsers viewing fixed width webpages. This leaves you with the problem of how to maximise your usage of your screen real estate, if a single application using the whole display is sub-optimal then viewing two or more applications can be more useful.
The simplest solution to this is to manually position and size the windows of your applications so you can view two or more at once. Arranging application windows manually quickly becomes tedious, due to the many events that can occur in a modern operating system which cause your application windows to be moved around, re-sized or moved to another monitor.
The solution to this problem is using Window Management utilities which allow you to easily re-size and move application windows around, typically using key combinations. These utilities exist for most operating systems for Mac OS X the window management utility is called SizeUp, the equivalent utility for the PC is called WinSplit Revolution. I use both of these applications daily, WinSplit is freeware but SizeUp costs a minimum of $4.99 and its worth every cent. Each utility has some unique features: WinSplit allows you to chain several window configurations on a single key combination and SizeUp allows you to set up a key combination for moving windows between monitors.
I would struggle to maximise my use of one or more large monitors without a Window Management utility. Hopefully one day this functionality will be built into operating systems as large monitors become more common. Until then Window Managment utilties are going to be an essential tool that ever serious power user needs.
In the Windows-world with Win 7 this will no longer always require an app if you don’t need any more precise controls – I’ve found the standard “Aero Snap” thing which makes a window half of the screen (and some other small things) is quite good for my use.
The only problem with it is that so far I haven’t managed to activate it on the border of the monitor which is shared by both monitors – it only seems to work on the side of the screen which doesn’t “continue” past the monitor.
Earlier I used an app called GridMove on Win XP which seemed pretty good, so there’s another tool for Windows users if you don’t find WinSplit to your liking.