Snap To Windows 11

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Jorun Gyllenband

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Aug 3, 2024, 1:16:20 PM8/3/24

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On Windows 10 (I believe since Windows 7), you can snap a window to the right hand side of the screen by dragging it to the right edge. In doing so, it occupies exactly half the screen, and fills top-to-bottom.

However, when there are other windows open - if these aren't already snapped to the left hand side of the screen - you are given a selection of the various windows you have open. Selecting one then fills the left hand side with this window.

However, if you have multiple widows sized multiple ways when you snap something to a side manually or with shortcuts (widow key + arrow direction) and are prompted to pick the second window you can just hit the escape key and all other windows will stay the same as before you snapped.

The Snap Assist tool will automatically appear once you have snapped your first window. Snap Assist will display all other open windows as thumbnails so you can choose which windows you would like to add to the selected layout.

Once you select a layout and snap every space with selected windows, this automatically becomes a Snap group. This feature can be useful when you are working on a specific task using many apps. If you are interrupted and open a new app, you can easily come back to the Snap group by hovering over one of the group's open apps to find the Snap group again.

Weird. I have never seen that behavior other than when going between screens of different resolutions. Normally passing a window from one screen to another happens seamlessly and getting snap to engage is usually a bit of a test of skill being able to stop the mouse in the correct 5-10 pixels for it to snap on the side of the windows you want. However, when the screens are different resolutions or positioned in a stagger in the screen layout manager then that creates a solid edge that the mouse runs into and snap happens.

If I would have to venture a guess on what is happening you have a difference in top pixels between your monitors and you are not moving the window from one to another low enough on the screen to avoid the invisible wall created by the stagger, or resolution difference. Does it behave the same if you move the windows back and for with the cursor mid-screen? If not, then you just need to go into the screen layout manager and ensure the tops of your screens align so that you can move windows back and forth without this happening, or get used to swinging low when going between screens. Either should work.

In this example moving a window from screen 1 to screen 3 requires the user to drop their mouse down the screen nearly 25% to move the window between screens without the behavior you describe happening.

Snap was originally introduced in Windows 7, where it was called Aero Snap; it let you snap two windows side by side on your screen. It got an upgrade in Windows 10, letting you snap up to four windows in quarters rather than two windows in halves.

You can snap windows with keyboard shortcuts, too. Hold down the Windows key on your keyboard and press the arrow keys to move the current window around. For example. If you have a maximized window and press Windows + Right arrow, it will be snapped to the right half of your screen. If you keep holding down the Windows key and press the up arrow key after the right arrow key, it will be snapped to the top-right quadrant of the screen.

Windows 11 makes Snap much easier to find and use. You can mouse-over the Maximize button at the top-right corner of any window to see Snap Layouts. Windows will show you a variety of layouts; click a position to immediately snap the window into that position on your screen.

Windows will show different layout options, depending on your screen size. If you have a big widescreen monitor, you may see options to snap three windows side by side in columns, while you may see options to snap only two windows side by side on a typical laptop screen.

These grouped windows will appear together on the taskbar and when you Alt+Tab, letting you quickly switch between groups of multiple windows at the same time. Just hover over a taskbar icon of one of the applications snapped in the group to see the group.

For example, you can disable the Snap Assist suggestions that appear after you snap a window, prevent the Snap Layouts pane from appearing when you hover over the Maximize button, or stop seeing groups of snapped applications when you press Alt+Tab.

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Is there any way to use the 'aero snap' functionality in gnome shell to pin windows to the right or left side of the screen using ONLY KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS? I've searched everywhere for this but there doesn't seem to big a single application providing this somewhat basic functionality.

Thanks for your quick response.
I have installed the latest version of snapd by running apt-get update and apt-get upgrade.
Here is the output from a couple of commands including the one you suggested.

On my stand-alone Ubuntu machine (on which Snappy does work) there is no sign of a snapd service when I try $service --status-all but there are the following entries in the /run directory: snapd, snapd-snap.socket and snapd.socket. These entries do not exist in my WSL installation.
I have tried removing and reinstalling snapd but this has made no difference.

I can recall some people made an experiment where a fake systemd would be installed (just a bunch of scripts) that would unpack squashfs files and would fake some service startup but this was barely a demo, at best.

Yes, that is what we did (or Matteo) did for OpenWRT. See the scripts here -openwrt/tree/master/snapd/files for some more details. This should get you around the missing systemd but leaves the other two points (confinement, squashfs).

Snap layouts are a new Windows 11 feature to help introduce users to the power of window snapping. Snap layouts are easily accessible by hovering the mouse over a window's maximize button or pressing Win + Z. After invoking the menu that shows the available layouts, users can click on a zone in a layout to snap a window to that particular zone and then use Snap Assist to finish building an entire layout of windows. Snap layouts are tailored to the current screen size and orientation, including support for three side-by-side windows on large landscape screens and top/bottom stacked windows on portrait screens.

If the app's window has the maximize caption button available, the system will automatically show snap layouts when a user hovers the mouse over the window's maximize button. Snap layouts will appear automatically for most apps, but some desktop apps may not show snap layouts. This topic describes how to make sure your app shows the menu with snap layouts if the system does not show it automatically.

If your app can invoke the menu with snap layouts but isn't able to snap properly to the zone sizes, it's likely that your app's minimum window size is too large for the window to fit in the selected zone.

I recently reloaded Rhino 4.0 after my hard drive blew up. Now the cursor is not recognizing the grid or snapping to it when I try to create geometry. I seem to recall a problem with this a long time ag and thee was pretty straight forward fix but it involved a written command sequence that I cannot recall to activate the grid snap feature. Can anyone give me a heads up on the fix for this? I am running Windows XP Pro 2002 SP3 and Rhino 4.0 dated 2/6/2007. FYI the Tool, Options, Grid menu shows the snap spacing to be set to .25" but I do not see a check box to turn it on or off.

I never liked this but in 4.10 the snap did not occur when dragging a window to another desktop. Now it does. A most irritating visual IMO. There was a post suggesting the option was in the Accessibility setting. I did not find anything that seems related. I have also searched the settings editor. A source patch would be fine with me. Thanks for any ideas.

But, with the new 4.12 I find that I need to move windows to the lower left side of the screen for them to go vertical-max, horizonontal-halfscreen. If I move it in the upper half of the left/right side I get a window which takes up 1/4 of the screen. Not sure if this is new or not. Also, pushing a window to the top of the screen now gives me a full-size window, not one which is full-horz/half-vert like it did in 4.10 ... and moving to the bottom of the screen does nothing at all.

Is there an equivalent tool available for use in Windows 7? I just need to browse the membership of some small Active Directory groups that are deep within a huge hierarchy, so I can eventually write code to work with those groups. The Windows Server 2003 version of the installer works, but the resulting MMC snap in just won't start up.