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

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 & 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!

Answer 1

can gridmove be of any assistance?

very handy tool on larger screens...

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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.