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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

I've found Windows window management to be pretty poor. They removed always on top (except in OneNote, and it's in power toys). Open a second Word document and all your docs get maximised. Undock and re-dock your MS machine from it's MS dock and the MS OS suddenly has no clue where to put your windows. Dock to a different dock (hot-desking; same brand and size of monitor) and the entire display options need to be re-written - no option to preserve it. Restart your machine and you can only load your Startup apps into one virtual desktop (I tried powertoys but it didn't seem to make anything better). Et cetera ...

It's pretty hard to believe that the people designing this system use it for work.

At least they got zones, coming from KDE and not having zones nor virtual windows, initially, was a big shock.

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They have Powertoys https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzon... and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/always-o...

not sure how good it is since I haven't used it myself

edit: you have to install it yourself

Powertoys is great!

I use it to manage how big my windows are across my monitors, or search for programs, or math, or always-on-top

> Dock to a different dock (hot-desking; same brand and size of monitor) and the entire display options need to be re-written - no option to preserve it

Does anything do this properly? I use i3[0], and wrote some super janky automation to preserve my layouts when I switched from dock to no dock and back. It has the concept of layouts that can be stored/loaded. So I had a script that would dump the layout, I had to manually run it before disconnecting (couldn't figure out how to detect the monitor disconnect and dump the layout before i3 re-arranged everything). And another script that would load the layout when new monitors were connected (this was easy enough to automate).

I'd be _really_ impressed if something did this correctly without any user hacking.

[0] https://i3wm.org/

> Dock to a different dock (hot-desking; same brand and size of monitor) and the entire display options need to be re-written - no option to preserve it.

Also the same on macos BTW. Switching external screens resets all the screen size options, including your laptop display if you’re not at the “default” resolution.

> They removed always on top

Are you saying macOS has this?

They're saying it was removed from Windows.

Yeah, the Office window handling is fucked up. But it’s because non-proficient users apparently got confused by each open document behaving like a separate app window.

I've been using DeskPins for "always on top" since I've known about its existence.

I use this AutoHotkey oneliner. WIN+Space pins/unpins the current window.

    #SPACE:: Winset, Alwaysontop, , A

(Save to set-always-on-top.ahk, and create a shortcut to the script in %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup. Optionally add #NoTrayIcon at the top of the script to get rid of the tray icon.)

Yeah AHK can fix a lot of this, but I only really use Windows on my employer's computer and they're very much averse to installing anything to help with QoL issues like this.

Surprisingly, there’s no way to keep an app on top on macOS!

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