Tag: userinterface

KDE-Style Window-Movement on Windows

One of the minor features I admire most in the common X11-Window-Manager implementations on Linux is the fact that you can move and resize Windows easily without first moving the mouse to a special location of the particular window: Dragging your mouse while holding Alt+(Left-Mouse-Button) will move the window, holding Alt+(Right-Mouse-Button) will resize the window on its nearest edge.

I always missed this little feature when working on Windows. Today I found a script for AutoHotkey, which is a free (GPL) scripting environment for hotkeys. After installing AutoHotkey, simply download and launch the script by double-clicking it and now you’ll have the same behaviour for window movement and resizing as under KDE. Really cool!

AutoHotkey can do a lot more, unfortunately I have not yet had time to try out more.

VisualStudio.NET: Text-Editor Guide at 80

Guiding lines in VS.NET 2005It is still considered good style to keep code-lines within a certain bound (e.g. 80 characters). IDEs like Eclipse offer to display a red guiding line at the chosen offset to help developers keep within this bound.

By modifying the registry a similar guide can be enabled for Visual Studio 2003 / 2005. Add a string value Guides to the key (VS.NET 2005, VS 2003 has version 7.1)

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Text Editor.

Set the value to

RGB(128,0,0) 80

To have multiple guides (like in the screenshot), add the additional columns space delimited, e.g.

RGB(128,0,0) 80 100

Ackn.: This information has been provided by Hannes Pavelka in Microsoft’s newsgroup microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp, Message-ID: <e1jag7$qk7$02$1@news.t-online.com> (Article in Google Groups):