If you want to move a window in a Windows operating system you need to left-click on the title bar and drag it to the desired location. A left-click anywhere else will not have the desired effect. Alt Drag which my good old buddy Samer recently reviewed at his excellent Freeware Genius blog makes moving windows a tad easier.
As the name suggests it makes use of the ALT key. Whenever that key is pressed windows can be moved by pressing the left mouse button anywhere in it. This will save some miles of mouse movement per month for many users.
Alt Drag comes with the additional feature to snap a selected window to the screen borders or visible windows on the desktop to make better use of the screen estate.
The software itself is portable and supplied in 7z format unfortunately. You need to find an unpacker that is able to unpack the 7z format. The functionality becomes available as soon as the application is started.
The program icon is located in the System Tray. Alt Drag used about 3 Megabytes of computer memory and 1 Megabyte of virtual memory on a Windows XP SP3 test system. Those are pretty good values for a handy application like this.
Update: AltDrag has been updated to version 0.9 by the developer in February 2011. A beta version of altDrag 1.0 has been released in July of the same year. Both versions sport several new features including support for Windows Aero, new AutoFocus and AutoRemaximize options, new mouse actions, the ability to scroll through windows with the mousehweel or a new configuration user interface.
The configuration utility will be merged with the main application making the initial program configuration more convenient. It is likely that the new version will be released soon.
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nice little app, but after running it for under a minute i already ran into conflicts – i needed to alt-click a toolbar button and alt drag got i the way :(
Of course, this has been a built in feature of KDE for years.
Needs to be tested but it looks very useful :-) thanks GHacks!!!
What’s wrong with 7zip?
And for all your unpacking needs give Universal Extractor a try – it’s a great piece of software. (Not affiliated – it’s just part of my toolbox!)
http://www.legroom.net/software/uniextract
“Of course, this has been a built in feature of KDE for years.”
i am hearing that more and more often these days. maybe it’s time to try dual-booting :)
Of course you could just use the built into Windows functionality and not load another utility at all.
With the window you want moved on top and ‘active’:
1. Hold down Alt + Spacebar
2. Press the M key
3. Use the arrow keys to relocate the window
4. Press the Enter key when you have the Window in the desired location.
@Revolutn:
Your steps take more time and moving of hands then dragging the window using the title bar. The point of ALT-Drag is to be fast at moving windows around. I use Linux (XFCE) and when I’m on my latop always find myself tryin to move windows with the ALT-DRAG with no luck. This addon is nice.