App to control windows' size and position

Question

I use a big monitor and I like to place windows in specific positions and sizes.

I'd like to have something like the maximize button (which sets the windows size to cover the whole screen) but that let me choose from a set of predefined areas.

Do you know of any app to do that in Windows?

Edit:
A app that let you do this using one hand only (mouse-only or keyboard-only) on a laptop (no numpad hotkeys) would be apreciated

Answer 1

Jeff wrote a good blog post about this a few years ago. The software he recommends is called WinSplit Revolution, and is free. It lets you draw different areas on your screen which are treated like their own display, so when you maximize a window in one of those areas, it maximizes to that area, not the whole screen. Pressing Ctrl+Alt+# maximizes a window to that number's region, for example, as in the diagram below.

The application has been updated since Jeff's post in 2007, and is supported on Windows 2000 through Vista, though I expect it probably works on Windows 7, too.

On Windows 7 (generally speaking, without extra software), you may also find it useful that you can "mash" a window against one of the sides of your monitor, and it will automatically take up that half of the screen. You can also drag the top border of a window into the top of the screen, causing it to maximize vertically but not horizontally. The keyboard shortcuts for these are +Shift+↑ to vertically maximize, and +← and +→ for left and right half-screen windows.

Answer 2

I use one such application and it is great. It is called GridMove. It starts with Windows (but only if you tell it to). When you hit Windows+G, it shows you the current monitor layout with the places where the window would go, with a number in each. You type this number on your keyboard and the window goes there, resized to the size of the place. Or you can also drag the window.

It comes with a few grid layouts preinstalled, but you can download more. There is a thread in their forum which lists additional layouts. Or you can write your own layout. It is done in a text file with a pretty intuitive syntax, and you can open the ready layouts to use as examples, so I found it very easy.

Another plus: you can have different layouts on different monitors. Very good if you have one small laptop monitor which can only show two vertical windows in a usable size, and a big external monitor where you can have three windows vertically.

The only disadvantage I've seen so far: you cannot group windows. So if you use an application which has several floating toolbars like Gimp with Brushes and Layers, you cannot move them together to occupy a square spot, but have to write them their own small spots into the layout and move them separately.

All this goodness is available as free and open source software and doesn't install any annoying browser toolbars etc.

You can get it here. Hope you like it!