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

Question

Like most developers, I fell in love with two monitors. I will not delve into all the reasons for their kindness; just take it for granted.

However, they are not perfect. You can never seem to be their “right.” You always have monitors with small offset angles. And, of course, the frame always gets in the way. And this is with the same monitors. The problem with other monitors is much worse - the VMWare multimonitor function does not even work with monitors with different resolutions.

When you use multiple monitors, one of them becomes your primary focus monitor. Your focus may flip from one monitor to another, but at any given time you usually focus on only one monitor. There are exceptions to this (WinDiff, Excel), but this is usually the case. I believe that the best monitor would be having one large monitor with all the benefits of multiple smaller monitors.

Widescreen monitors are fantastic, but it's hard to use the entire space efficiently. If you write code, you usually work on the left side of the window. If you increase the size of the editor on a widescreen monitor, the right side of the window will be white. Programs like WinSplit Revolution can help organize your windows, but it's really just a call to the symptom, not a problem. Even when using WinSplit Revolution, when you maximize the window, it will occupy the entire screen. You cannot lock a window in a specific section of the screen.

There are virtual monitors.

What would be very nice is a video driver that sits on top of an existing driver, but allows you to virtualize one monitor on multiple monitors. The control panel will see your single physical monitor as two or more virtual monitors. The software may even support a virtual frame to emphasize what is happening, or you can choose a seamless mode. Programs like WinSplit Revolution and UltraMon will still work. This virtual video driver will allow you to slice and slice your physical monitor into as many virtual monitors as you want.

Does anyone know if such software exists? If not, is there any venerable Windows display driver guru ready to accept the challenge?

I will not be after the many available virtual desktop / window manager programs. I am upset with these programs. At first, they seem good, but usually they have strange behavior and work poorly with other programs (such as WinSplit Revolution).

I want the real thing!

Answer 1

can gridmove provide any help?

a very convenient tool on large screens ...

Answer 2

I use WinSplit Revolution to enable keyboard layout, and I use bblean as a replacement for explorer. It has several workspace features built into it, and lets you customize it exactly the way you want it to look.

Answer 3

Window manager seems to be what you want. The problem is finding what works.

I am using the Linux window tile manager ( dwm ), and it seems to do what you need, PLUS several workspaces that I thought you were going to first.

The window pane manager has no concept of "maximized" windows. All windows occupy all the space that they allocate, and they never overlap. When only one window appears on the screen, it gets a full screen. Open another window and it will open next to the first, while the first resizing will automatically take up only part of the screen. In dwm, the separation between them is controlled by keystrokes. Each additional window occupies its own allocated space on the screen, and any existing windows are modified to fit them depending on the layout you choose.

Workspaces use "tags"; any window can have one or more tags, and you can choose to view any windows that have one or more specific tag sets at a time. This way you can hide windows that you don’t want to see and allow other windows to take up more space.

Unfortunately, several add-ons that I tried for Windows do not work either. Although dwm has a few quirks with some applications that use an interface such as SDI, such as Gimp or Pidgin (you can set windows as “floating” over the mosaic layout to get around this), I never got confused about where my windows are or push windows from the screen, like some of the window managers I tried on Windows. If someone knows something with equivalent functionality that actually WORKS on Windows, I would really like to know about it.

Answer 4

From what I understand, you can just manage windows using Microsoft. hold control and select multiple windows on the taskbar, then right-click and draw whatever you want. what i was looking for is a way to split a physical monitor into two. therefore, you can run not only window programs (explorer, firefox, whatever), but also full-screen programs, such as games or movies, or whatever you want. This is very useful for fixing errors in full-screen programs. I’m tired of these “window managers”; the easiest way is to click and drag where you want. and they don’t have an OCD about this just right. I just want to split the monitor into two. so hard to ask?

Answer 5

The only software that I discovered already exists Matrox PowerDesk . Among other things, it allows you to split the monitor into 2 virtual desktops. However, you must have a compatible matrox graphics card. It also performs many other functions with multiple monitors.

Answer 6

I was looking for the same thing, I have a widescreen monitor that on many games makes them stretch funny or gives black bars on the sides, ect ... I would like this space to be OPEN, so that I can run programs, maybe surf the Internet , use my IM, check my playlist, etc., Without minimizing my damn game ... For this function, you will need the following functions:

1) the ability to split 1 screen into 2 (dur) 2) the mouse is locked in 1 or in another window if something in this window is full-screen (not smeared, but the actual full-screen), if a certain key is not held (maybe windows? ) 3) the ability to adjust the border, accept unequal parts (70/30 sounds good)

Im really looking at an even wider screen monitor, but if I can't find a program to pre-configure this feature, I will probably just stick with two monitors ...

Answer 7

How to just use virtual desktops? You can distribute your windows around several workspaces. Something like Virtual Dimension should give you most of this functionality. I use Linux virtual desktops all the time, and this is the best for multiple monitors.

Answer 8

The next version of Windows (Windows 7) will allow you to snap windows to the left or right half of the screen. Now it does not help, but this is what you can count on.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081028-first-look-at-windows-7.html

Answer 9

Right now I'm using twinsplay to arrange my windows side by side.

I tried Winsplit before, but I couldn’t get it working because the default hotkeys (Ctrl-Alt-Left, Ctrl-Alt-Right) ran into the graphics card hotkeys to rotate the screen and set different hotkeys Do not work. Twinsplay just worked for me out of the box.

Another nice thing in twinsplay is that it also allows me to save and restore Windows “sessions”, so I can save my working environment (eclipse, total commander, visual studio, msdn, outlook, firefox) before turning off the computer at night, and then quickly return to him in the morning.

Answer 10

There may be other potential solutions (I am still looking), but so far I have found http://www.maxivista.com/ in search of the same functionality. As far as I can tell, it only supports a dual monitor, not a few.