Hacker News Reader

Comment by kryogen1c | Hacker News Reader

Im a huge fan of window management, so I'll definitely check this out.

Incumbents are pretty strong, though. Windows 10 introduced Snap, which easily breaks your screen into halves or quadrants

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4027324/windows-10-...

Sysinternals, well known for simple powerfull tools, makes a program called Desktops. It creates a total of 4 sets of desktops you can hotkey between.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/desk...

sysinternals desktops multiplies my 3 monitors and gives me 12, and a few are quartered or halved. 16 "sections" in use pretty commonly with no extra software or hardware cost.

It should be noted that my work computer has 8gb ram and an i5, so if i can do it you can too : )

View on HN

For Windows 10, you probably don't need Desktops anymore. If you click on the task view button on the toolbar, one of the options at the top is to add virtual desktops. You cycle between them with ctrl-win-left and ctrl-win-right.

Oh my - I didnt know. Will investigate, thanks!

Win+Tab opens up an overlay that allows you add a desktop as well.

That's another way of getting to the task view.

They have absolutely ruined this in the past few years. It was once very snappy, and tiled everything perfectly on the screen. Then they made it scroll. Then they added "Timelines". Then they added a zoom out animation that doesn't respond to any of your Windows animation settings. Now, even on a high end computer, it will take you a full second before everything is zoomed out and tiled (with one final flash as it adds window titles and shifts everything around), and at least in my case has a probably 5% chance of crashing explorer.exe and needing even more time to re-launch.

This was the featured that made me go "okay, Windows 10 is doing some good things, I'll upgrade from 7", and now I hate it.

Late follow up comment: I just tried it out, and like sibling comment from ukyrgf says its kind of terrible.

Desktops is fast and seamless. Task View is very slow and awkward. Win+Tab takes nearly a second to load and the default focus starts in your current desktop, instead of the desktop switcher. Process to Task View from desktop 1 to 4: win+tab > shift+tab > right arrow > right arrow > right arrow > enter. You can ctrl+win+left|right to move a desktop at a time, but it doesnt wrap so to go desktop 1 to desktop 4, I have to swipe through 2&3 to get there. The cutesy swipe animation takes a half-second, so it takes ~2 seconds to get from 1 to 4. Do you think people managing multiple virtual desktops via hotkeys are interested in cutesy animations at noticeable performance cost, Microsoft?

Task View is worse than alt-tabbing through 20 open windows without any virtual desktops at all. Sysinternals Desktops takes the win, and not by a little bit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com