Widow is a program that is meant to scan windows in the background and then reposition or scale them according to a set of predefined rules. The program is a recreation of ShiftWindow but in a more intuitive and friendly manner. Contrasted with other software, Widow is a tray-only application that starts on Windows load and then provides a context menu to configure rules and toggle settings. Widow was created with NVIDIA Mosaic in mind where full screen applications, particularly games based on the Unity engine, tend to maximize the game window on start and attempting to change the resolution in-game is not possible, most likely due to NVIDIA Mosaic reporting the multiple screens as a single screen very low down in the Windows ABI. Widow can thus be used to forcibly set the size or position of an application window thereby alleviating the need to temporarily disable NVIDIA Mosaic when playing games.

• Widow

In order to force the resolution or position of a window, the rule editor can be used to add a window to the current configuration and set the width, height and the top and left corner. The list box on the left continuously scans for application windows and adds them to the list by title.

Selecting one of the titles and clicking the Add button will add the window to the list of configured windows inside the right list box. Similarly, a configured window can be removed by selecting the window in the right list box and then clicking the Remove button.

If necessary, the list of windows currently on the desktop can be refreshed via the Refresh button.

With a set of rules defined for various windows, a type of apply must be chosen. This can be done by navigating the context menu to Apply… and then selecting one of the available options. Here is a list of options and how they are designed to work:

• On Window Create - this setting will scan all windows appearing on the desktop for the windows configured via the rule editor and once a configured window is found, Widow will apply the settings defined for the window.

Here are various usage cases for Widow.

Say, you are playing an Unity game with NVIDIA Mosaic enabled (or any other multiple-screen manager for that matter) and when you launch the game, the game occupies all screens and sets itself to maximum resolution. Even if you change the settings from within the game to windowed mode, the game still lists only the maximal resolution of all combined screens.

In that situation, you could:

• use Alt+Tab or minimize the game in order to reach the desktop (but do not close the game),
• launch Widow and select Edit Rules…,
• select the game window title from the left list box and click Add to add it to the right list box,
• click the game window name inside the right list box and set the desired resolution,
• restart the game and Widow will forcibly set the resolution you configured.

Widow was released on the 6th of May 2021 and is licensed under the MIT license.

Credits for the icons goes to flaticons.com.