Is there a way to split a widescreen monitor in to two or more virtual monitors

Question

Like most developers I have grown to love dual monitors  I won t go into all the reasons for their goodness  just take it as a given   However  they are not perfect  You can never seem to line them up  just right   You always end up with the monitors at slight funny angles  And of course the bezel always gets in the way  And this is with identical monitors  The problem is much worse with different monitors -- VMWare s multi monitor feature won t even work with monitors of differnt resolutions   When you use multiple monnitors  one of them becomes your primary monitor of focus  Your focus may flip from one monitor to the other  but at any point in time you are usually focusing on only one monitor  There are exceptions to this  WinDiff  Excel   but this is generally the case  I suggest that having a single large monitor with all the benefits of multiple smaller monitors would be a better solution   Wide screen monitors are fantastic  but it is hard to use all the space efficiently  If you are writing code you are generally working on the left-hand side of the window  If you maximize an editor on a wide-screen monitor the right-hand side of the window will be a sea of white  Programs like WinSplit Revolution will help to organise your windows  but this is really just addressing the symptom  not the problem  Even with WinSplit Revolution  when you maximise a window it will take up the whole screen  You can t lock a window into a specific section of the screen   This is where virtual monitors comes in    What would be really nice is a video driver that sits on top of the existing driver  but allows a single monitor to be virtualised into multiple monitors  Control Panel would see your single physical monitor as two or more virtual monitors  The software could even support a virtual bezel to emphasise what is happening  or you could opt for seamless mode  Programs like WinSplit Revolution and UltraMon would still work  This virtual video driver would allow you to slice  amp  dice your physical monitor into as many virtual monitors as you want    Does anybody know if such software exists  If not  are there any budding Windows display driver guru s out there willing to take up the challenge   I am not after the myriad of virtual desktop window manager programs that are available  I get frustrated with these programs  They seem good at first but they usually have some strange behaviour and don t work well with other programs  such as WinSplit Revolution     I want the real thing

User · Answer

What about just using virtual desktops  You can spread your windows around among multiple workspaces  Something like Virtual Dimension should give you most of that functionality  I use virtual desktops all the time on Linux  and it s the next best thing to multiple monitors

User · Answer

can gridmove be of any assistance   very handy tool on larger screens

User · Answer

From what i understand  you can just manage windows using microsoft  hold control and select multiple windows in the taskbar  then right click it and tile whatever way you want  what i ve been looking for is a way to actually split a physical monitor into two  so you can run not just windowed prgrams  explorer  firefox  whatever  but full screen programs like games or movies or whatever else you want  this is super useful to fix bugs in full screen programs  im tired of these  windows mangagers  its easier just to click and drag it where you want  and im not OCD about it lining up just right  i just want to split a monitor into two  is that so hard to ask

User · Answer

can gridmove be of any assistance   very handy tool on larger screens

User · Answer

Right now  I m using twinsplay to organize my windows side by side    I tried Winsplit before  but I couldn t get it to work because the default hotkeys   Ctrl-Alt-Left  Ctrl-Alt-Right   clashed with the graphics card hotkeys for rotating my screen and setting different hotkeys just didn t work  Twinsplay just worked for me out of the box   Another nice thing about twinsplay is that it also allows me to save and restore windows  sessions  - so I can save my work environment   eclipse  total commander  visual studio  msdn  outlook  firefox   before turning off the computer at night and then quickly get back to it in the morning

User · Answer

What about just using virtual desktops  You can spread your windows around among multiple workspaces  Something like Virtual Dimension should give you most of that functionality  I use virtual desktops all the time on Linux  and it s the next best thing to multiple monitors

User · Answer

can gridmove be of any assistance   very handy tool on larger screens

User · Answer

Right now  I m using twinsplay to organize my windows side by side    I tried Winsplit before  but I couldn t get it to work because the default hotkeys   Ctrl-Alt-Left  Ctrl-Alt-Right   clashed with the graphics card hotkeys for rotating my screen and setting different hotkeys just didn t work  Twinsplay just worked for me out of the box   Another nice thing about twinsplay is that it also allows me to save and restore windows  sessions  - so I can save my work environment   eclipse  total commander  visual studio  msdn  outlook  firefox   before turning off the computer at night and then quickly get back to it in the morning

User · Answer

The only software that I found that already exists is  Matrox PowerDesk  Among other things it lets you split a monitor into 2 virtual desktops  You have to have a compatible matrox video card though  It also does a bunch of other multi-monitor functions

User · Answer

From what i understand  you can just manage windows using microsoft  hold control and select multiple windows in the taskbar  then right click it and tile whatever way you want  what i ve been looking for is a way to actually split a physical monitor into two  so you can run not just windowed prgrams  explorer  firefox  whatever  but full screen programs like games or movies or whatever else you want  this is super useful to fix bugs in full screen programs  im tired of these  windows mangagers  its easier just to click and drag it where you want  and im not OCD about it lining up just right  i just want to split a monitor into two  is that so hard to ask

User · Answer

From what i understand  you can just manage windows using microsoft  hold control and select multiple windows in the taskbar  then right click it and tile whatever way you want  what i ve been looking for is a way to actually split a physical monitor into two  so you can run not just windowed prgrams  explorer  firefox  whatever  but full screen programs like games or movies or whatever else you want  this is super useful to fix bugs in full screen programs  im tired of these  windows mangagers  its easier just to click and drag it where you want  and im not OCD about it lining up just right  i just want to split a monitor into two  is that so hard to ask

User · Answer

It seems a window manager is what you want  The problem is finding one that works   I use a tiling window manager in Linux  dwm  and it seems to do exactly what you are after  PLUS it has multiple workspaces which is what I thought you were going for at first   A tiling window manager has no concept of  maximized  windows  All windows take up the full amount of space that they are allotted  and they never overlap  When you only have one window up on the screen  it gets the full screen  Open up another window  and it opens next to the first  while the first re-sizes automatically to take up only part of the screen  In dwm  the split between them is adjustable with keystrokes  Additional windows each take up their own allotted space on the screen  and any existing windows re-size to accommodate them depending on the particular layout you have chosen    Workspaces use  tags   any window can have one or more tags  and you can choose to see any windows that have one or more of a certain set of tags at a time  Thus you can hide windows that you don t want to see  and let the other windows take up more space   Unfortunately  the few tiling add-ons I ve tried for Windows don t work anywhere near as well  Although dwm has a few quirks with certain apps that use an SDI-style interface like Gimp or Pidgin  you can set windows as  floating  above the tiled layout to work around this   I ve never had it get confused about where my windows are or shove windows off the screen like some of the window managers I ve tried on Windows  If anyone knows of something with equivalent functionality that actually WORKS on Windows  I would love to know about it

User · Answer

From what i understand  you can just manage windows using microsoft  hold control and select multiple windows in the taskbar  then right click it and tile whatever way you want  what i ve been looking for is a way to actually split a physical monitor into two  so you can run not just windowed prgrams  explorer  firefox  whatever  but full screen programs like games or movies or whatever else you want  this is super useful to fix bugs in full screen programs  im tired of these  windows mangagers  its easier just to click and drag it where you want  and im not OCD about it lining up just right  i just want to split a monitor into two  is that so hard to ask

User · Answer

The next version of Windows  Windows 7  will be able to snap windows to the left or right half of the screen  Doesn t help right now  but it s something to look forward to   http   arstechnica com news ars post 20081028-first-look-at-windows-7 html

User · Answer

It seems a window manager is what you want  The problem is finding one that works   I use a tiling window manager in Linux  dwm  and it seems to do exactly what you are after  PLUS it has multiple workspaces which is what I thought you were going for at first   A tiling window manager has no concept of  maximized  windows  All windows take up the full amount of space that they are allotted  and they never overlap  When you only have one window up on the screen  it gets the full screen  Open up another window  and it opens next to the first  while the first re-sizes automatically to take up only part of the screen  In dwm  the split between them is adjustable with keystrokes  Additional windows each take up their own allotted space on the screen  and any existing windows re-size to accommodate them depending on the particular layout you have chosen    Workspaces use  tags   any window can have one or more tags  and you can choose to see any windows that have one or more of a certain set of tags at a time  Thus you can hide windows that you don t want to see  and let the other windows take up more space   Unfortunately  the few tiling add-ons I ve tried for Windows don t work anywhere near as well  Although dwm has a few quirks with certain apps that use an SDI-style interface like Gimp or Pidgin  you can set windows as  floating  above the tiled layout to work around this   I ve never had it get confused about where my windows are or shove windows off the screen like some of the window managers I ve tried on Windows  If anyone knows of something with equivalent functionality that actually WORKS on Windows  I would love to know about it

User · Answer

It seems a window manager is what you want  The problem is finding one that works   I use a tiling window manager in Linux  dwm  and it seems to do exactly what you are after  PLUS it has multiple workspaces which is what I thought you were going for at first   A tiling window manager has no concept of  maximized  windows  All windows take up the full amount of space that they are allotted  and they never overlap  When you only have one window up on the screen  it gets the full screen  Open up another window  and it opens next to the first  while the first re-sizes automatically to take up only part of the screen  In dwm  the split between them is adjustable with keystrokes  Additional windows each take up their own allotted space on the screen  and any existing windows re-size to accommodate them depending on the particular layout you have chosen    Workspaces use  tags   any window can have one or more tags  and you can choose to see any windows that have one or more of a certain set of tags at a time  Thus you can hide windows that you don t want to see  and let the other windows take up more space   Unfortunately  the few tiling add-ons I ve tried for Windows don t work anywhere near as well  Although dwm has a few quirks with certain apps that use an SDI-style interface like Gimp or Pidgin  you can set windows as  floating  above the tiled layout to work around this   I ve never had it get confused about where my windows are or shove windows off the screen like some of the window managers I ve tried on Windows  If anyone knows of something with equivalent functionality that actually WORKS on Windows  I would love to know about it

User · Answer

I use WinSplit Revolution for the keyboard arrangement capability and I use bblean as a replacement for Explorer   It has multiple workspace capabilities built right in and it allows you to customize it exactly how you want it to look

User · Answer

The only software that I found that already exists is  Matrox PowerDesk  Among other things it lets you split a monitor into 2 virtual desktops  You have to have a compatible matrox video card though  It also does a bunch of other multi-monitor functions

User · Answer

The next version of Windows  Windows 7  will be able to snap windows to the left or right half of the screen  Doesn t help right now  but it s something to look forward to   http   arstechnica com news ars post 20081028-first-look-at-windows-7 html

User · Answer

There may be other potential solutions out there  I am still looking  but thus far in my search for the same functionality  I have only found http   www maxivista com     As far as I can tell through  it only supports a dual monitor  not multiple

User · Answer

It seems a window manager is what you want  The problem is finding one that works   I use a tiling window manager in Linux  dwm  and it seems to do exactly what you are after  PLUS it has multiple workspaces which is what I thought you were going for at first   A tiling window manager has no concept of  maximized  windows  All windows take up the full amount of space that they are allotted  and they never overlap  When you only have one window up on the screen  it gets the full screen  Open up another window  and it opens next to the first  while the first re-sizes automatically to take up only part of the screen  In dwm  the split between them is adjustable with keystrokes  Additional windows each take up their own allotted space on the screen  and any existing windows re-size to accommodate them depending on the particular layout you have chosen    Workspaces use  tags   any window can have one or more tags  and you can choose to see any windows that have one or more of a certain set of tags at a time  Thus you can hide windows that you don t want to see  and let the other windows take up more space   Unfortunately  the few tiling add-ons I ve tried for Windows don t work anywhere near as well  Although dwm has a few quirks with certain apps that use an SDI-style interface like Gimp or Pidgin  you can set windows as  floating  above the tiled layout to work around this   I ve never had it get confused about where my windows are or shove windows off the screen like some of the window managers I ve tried on Windows  If anyone knows of something with equivalent functionality that actually WORKS on Windows  I would love to know about it

User · Answer

can gridmove be of any assistance   very handy tool on larger screens

User · Answer

The only software that I found that already exists is  Matrox PowerDesk  Among other things it lets you split a monitor into 2 virtual desktops  You have to have a compatible matrox video card though  It also does a bunch of other multi-monitor functions

User · Answer

I use WinSplit Revolution for the keyboard arrangement capability and I use bblean as a replacement for Explorer   It has multiple workspace capabilities built right in and it allows you to customize it exactly how you want it to look

User · Answer

The next version of Windows  Windows 7  will be able to snap windows to the left or right half of the screen  Doesn t help right now  but it s something to look forward to   http   arstechnica com news ars post 20081028-first-look-at-windows-7 html

User · Answer

I use WinSplit Revolution for the keyboard arrangement capability and I use bblean as a replacement for Explorer   It has multiple workspace capabilities built right in and it allows you to customize it exactly how you want it to look

User · Answer

What about just using virtual desktops  You can spread your windows around among multiple workspaces  Something like Virtual Dimension should give you most of that functionality  I use virtual desktops all the time on Linux  and it s the next best thing to multiple monitors

User · Answer

What about just using virtual desktops  You can spread your windows around among multiple workspaces  Something like Virtual Dimension should give you most of that functionality  I use virtual desktops all the time on Linux  and it s the next best thing to multiple monitors

User · Answer

The next version of Windows  Windows 7  will be able to snap windows to the left or right half of the screen  Doesn t help right now  but it s something to look forward to   http   arstechnica com news ars post 20081028-first-look-at-windows-7 html

User · Answer

The only software that I found that already exists is  Matrox PowerDesk  Among other things it lets you split a monitor into 2 virtual desktops  You have to have a compatible matrox video card though  It also does a bunch of other multi-monitor functions

User · Answer

I use WinSplit Revolution for the keyboard arrangement capability and I use bblean as a replacement for Explorer   It has multiple workspace capabilities built right in and it allows you to customize it exactly how you want it to look

User · Answer

There may be other potential solutions out there  I am still looking  but thus far in my search for the same functionality  I have only found http   www maxivista com     As far as I can tell through  it only supports a dual monitor  not multiple

[multiple-monitors] Is there a way to split a widescreen monitor in to two or more virtual monitors?

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