Jon Aquino's Mental Garden

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Sunday, December 11, 2005

Getting multi-monitor-like docking out of a single monitor

At 2:34 AM today, quite by accident, I discovered an easy way to simulate the "docking" power of multiple monitors, on a single monitor. And surprisingly it's all thanks to a chat client (Trillian).

Simply download the Trillian chat client, and dock the contact list by dragging it close to the edge of your screen. Make it as wide as you want:



Now when you maximize windows, they confine themselves to the left portion of the screen:



And you can put whatever windows you want on the right side of the screen. The beauty is that these things on the right side won't get covered up when you maximize a window.



It's kind of like having two monitors. And even if you do have two monitors, it's nice to have this "third monitor" as a little place to put things you want to keep an eye on, like chat clients, or windows that you want to keep visible without covering up other windows.


 
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