Win 7 Tips

[w7tips-blog]

Double click to Expand

I love W7's desktop composition feature - the thing that allows you to drag a window to the edge of a screen to auto-maximize it to fill half of the screen. A shortcut to make a window fill the screen vertically is to double click on the bottom edge of the window (where you'd usually go to resize the window). Pretty useful I thought.

[w7tips-blog]

VirtuaWin

I first started using computer with the Windows OS (like most other people), resisted against the Mac/Apple movement until I finally gave in with OS X 10.5, played around with Ubuntu and other versions of Linux, I now use Fedora at work, and finally settled with Windows 7 because I needed a new PC that was powerful but not as expensive as a Mac.

At any rate, one of the things I missed most about Mac/Linux is that those OS's both have built-in support for workspaces (called "Spaces" in Mac lingo). I did some research and came across VirtuaWin which, despite being pretty ugly appearance-wise, is very functional and performs just the way I want it to.

I've mapped CTRL+ALT+ARROWS to switch between workspaces and WINDOWS+ALT+ARROWS to move windows between workspaces...I admit the last hotkey with the Windows/Super key is pretty random.

Did I mention it's free?

Screenshots.

[w7tips-blog]

AutoHotkey: Step 1

In my quest to find a qliner hotkeys replacement, I came across AutoHotkey bliss (I was looking for a replacement because qliner has a problem running on Windows 7 64-bit).

I love how powerful AutoHotkey seems to be and in literally 5 minutes I could look up and create this basic script for opening up 2 common folders I use everyday. The last line of the script is so that pressing only the right ALT button will open up Window's context menu that usually shows up when you right-click on something. Some keyboards have this key (AppsKey) but my Apple keyboard doesn't so this AutoHotkey script will automagically map the right alt key to this context menu key.

^1::Run C:\Users\elee\Downloads

^2::Run D:\

RAlt::AppsKey

edit: the Startup folder is so that you don't need to manually run each script every time you use your computer. Things in this special folder get run every time you start up Windows.