window Snap is as fundamental the windows as save windows today we're
gonna tell you how to take it to the next level with fancy zones so by now
you should have used windows snap but if you haven't let me give you a quick
tutorial in Windows of course Ewa we do is on a daily basis is open windows
closed windows resize windows and with snap it's very easy to take a window
such as a web browser right here and pin it to one side or another that allows
you to open up another window over here to the side which allows you to
essentially double your monitors space for the price of one screen I use this
all the time even on multiple screens it allows me to see more things at once
with snap of course you can go ahead and pin things to either side you can
actually go ahead and pin these to a corner as well which gives you an
interesting sort of arrangement like this where you have three windows on the
screen at once but with this though you can see them like the limitations of
what we're looking at so for example with this Bing window down here below
you can't really see a whole lot did it with this window up here on the side it
might be better if we were to use columns instead of little tiny
rectangles now we can do this with a new tool called fancy zones and fancy zones
is actually an app within power toys now if you're a longtime Windows user dating
back to Windows XP or Windows 7 you might be familiar with power toys in
fact with Windows XP there were apps that would allow you to essentially turn
anything that was not an audio CD into an auto playable CD and with power toys
Microsoft's rebooted it for the windows 10 generation so this is a pre-release
piece of software and you have to actually download it on github but once
you do that you get the power toys menu and in fact it's gonna live way down
here on the taskbar and in fact power toys actually has two separate apps both
of which need to be turned on there's fancy zones here and then there's a
shortcut guide here the shortcut guide is essentially a quick overview that if
you hold down the windows key for a minute or two or sorry a second of two
you get this sort of this list of shortcuts
power toys is really sorry fancy zones is really what we're interested right
now once we're in the general settings we can actually launch fancy zones from
the left-hand nav bar here and were immediately faced with a number of
different configuration options we'll talk about those a little bit later but
for right now we can launch the edit zone of the zone editor by hitting this
button here or going ahead and hitting the windows + the tilde key and you can
see this hiding behind the menu it's a little bit quirky but here we are with
the options now we have two options here we can go ahead and use templates which
we're gonna go ahead and look at first or we can go ahead and create a custom
layout now the custom templates allow you to go ahead and use say this focus
which is sort of this you know windows stacked on top of the other columns rows
grids or priority grids which again gives you sort of a bit of a focus on
that center column you can go ahead and adjust the numbers here by adding or
subtracting and when you're ready let's go ahead and use columns we can apply
them now what you should see and what we've seen before is that when we use
the windows key we can go ahead and move these things around on the screen and we
get a nice column look we can go ahead and scroll on each we can go ahead and
copy from one other you can see this would be quite useful and you know say
writing a paper or something of that sort where you're sort of looking at one
webpage and referencing it to another so you can of course go back into the
configuration menu and the zone editor and actually switch if you'd like to
give you a rose or priority grids and so forth we're not going to do that right
now instead we're gonna look at the custom templates which are on the
separate page now custom templates can be performed in two different ways you
can actually create one additively which is a say basically from nothing where
you're putting sort of window zones on the screen and it resizing them and
basically creating your own custom layout or you can do it subtractive Li
which is it basically say our I want to have an existing template and
I just want to modify it perhaps even just get rid of a zone for example then
you can do another one so let me just go ahead and show you
what it looks like when you actually create one additively this is the custom
layout I've done earlier and you can see that right now we've got it sort of
everything arranged in such a way and in fact the windows should arrange by
themselves if we go back into the zone editor and actually just edit the
selected layout you can see that these different windows in fact let me just
move this sort of away from each other these zones can be modified I can drag
them out I can go ahead and close them get rid of them we using this X button
there's modifications where you can go ahead and create a little bit of space
in between or thicker than the borders for example and this should show up on
the screen when you're actually creating a custom layout of course you can go
ahead and go ahead and save it if you want and appliance to the windows on the
screen and again you know if you're selecting if you're switching between
different layouts you can adjust the windows as you wish so that is the
basics of creating a layout now again there are different settings to go ahead
and adjust there's a few of them and I don't necessarily think they're the most
intuitive by default for example I like the fact that I want to go ahead and
override Windows snap hotkeys the windows + the arrow key to go ahead and
move windows between the zones others people may not want to Microsoft thinks
that you might not want them either you can go ahead and keep windows Ozone when
the screen resolution changes you can flash the zones what I think is great
when you change the layout and so forth these are all pretty useful there's one
thing down here it's worth knowing about as well and that is there's options to
play with fancy zones when you're adjusting the multiple desktops you
Windows allows you of course to play with multiple desktops intent and task
view you can use fancy of you zones with that there's one catch to this all and
one thing that can improve fancy stones only works
on the default window the active window so if you're using multiple monitors
you're only gonna get fancy zones on a single monitor at this point in time
it's the active one I use my laptop as the active monitor I've had to move it
to the actual my actual secondary monitor that's fine I expect this to be
improved in the future but for right now it's not so just keep that in mind in
any event though that's pretty much fancy zelans in a nutshell I expect
again this will improve over time but for right now this is a fundamental
change in Windows and one I think you will appreciate