Maketober Day 22: Make Life Easier with Microsoft PowerToys Fancy Zones

I recently got a much larger monitor. Part of this was driven by a desire to see more of the world when flying with Flight Simulator, but also because I thought it might make me more productive. If it worked I my plan was to buy a video projector and paint the wall white..

Anyhoo, the new screen is jolly nice, but window management can be a pane (pun intended). Enter Microsoft PowerToys. Among a bunch of useful things is the very useful Fancy Windows utility. This lets you configure a set of zones onto your screen. You can then move windows into those zones by holding down the SHIFT character while dragging. This makes it really easy to spread things over your display. There are other ways you can push applications onto the zones but I like using the Shift key.

I’d say that just Fancy Zones was totally worth the price of admission to PowerToys, but as they are a free download this would be a silly point to make. The only tiny snag that I’ve found is that the tools work best when running as Administrator and can be a bit of a faff. However, I reckon the tools are totally worth the effort.