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

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

What about just using virtual desktops? You can spread your windows around among multiple workspaces. Something like Virtual Dimension should give you most of that functionality. I use virtual desktops all the time on Linux, and it's the next best thing to multiple monitors.

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

can gridmove be of any assistance?

very handy tool on larger screens...

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

The next version of Windows (Windows 7) will be able to snap windows to the left or right half of the screen. Doesn't help right now, but it's something to look forward to.

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

Answer 6

From what i understand, you can just manage windows using microsoft. hold control and select multiple windows in the taskbar, then right click it and tile whatever way you want. what i've been looking for is a way to actually split a physical monitor into two. so you can run not just windowed prgrams (explorer, firefox, whatever) but full screen programs like games or movies or whatever else you want. this is super useful to fix bugs in full screen programs. im tired of these "windows mangagers" its easier just to click and drag it where you want. and im not OCD about it lining up just right. i just want to split a monitor into two. is that so hard to ask?

Answer 7

The only software that I found that already exists is Matrox PowerDesk. Among other things it lets you split a monitor into 2 virtual desktops. You have to have a compatible matrox video card though. It also does a bunch of other multi-monitor functions.

Answer 8

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

I tried Winsplit before, but I couldn't get it to work because the default hotkeys ( Ctrl-Alt-Left, Ctrl-Alt-Right ) clashed with the graphics card hotkeys for rotating my screen and setting different hotkeys just didn't work. Twinsplay just worked for me out of the box.

Another nice thing about twinsplay is that it also allows me to save and restore windows "sessions" - so I can save my work environment ( eclipse, total commander, visual studio, msdn, outlook, firefox ) before turning off the computer at night and then quickly get back to it in the morning.

Answer 9

Have you seen http://www.ishadow.com/?tabid=115?

Answer 10

Ive been looking for the exact same thing, i have a wide screen monitor, which on alot of games, makes them stretch funny, or gives black bars on the sides, ect... I would love for that space to be OPEN, for me to run programs on, maybe browse the internet, use my IM, check my playlist, ect, without having to minimize my damn game... The features this program would require are:

1) ability to split 1 screen into 2 (dur) 2) mouse locked into 1 or the other window, if anything in that window is full screen (not mazimized, but actual full screen) unless a certain key is being held (maybe windows?) 3) ability to adjust the border, to take up unequal portions (70/30 sounds nice)

Im actually looking at an even wider screen monitor, but unless i can find a program to preform this functionality, im probably just gonna stick with 2 monitors...

Answer 11

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

Answer 12

http://www.dexpot.de/

Seriously works...

Answer 13

Dexpot is awesome!!