I just upgraded to a brand new 4k widescreen curved monitor here at home.
And of course the first issue I ran into was how to manage all the windows.
So I figured out how to do that.
And I'm going to show you how so tune in.
All right.
Welcome back everyone.
I'm James Monson Magno.
And today I am going to show you how I use a very simple and awesome application for
windows to help manage my entire desktop monitor setup, whether I'm live coding in
meetings and scheduling on zoom and teams, or I'm just here recording videos at home.
Now my wife got a brand new widescreen 29 inch monitor.
That's curved for her desk.
And I immediately, I was super jealous.
So I decided to go and look and hunt out there for a new
widescreen curved monitor for me.
I found this LG curved display on Costco.
Uh, it was on sale for a hundred dollars off, so I couldn't
pass it up and I got it.
And while 35 inches is quite big, um, I'm quite happy with it.
I was able to sell some of my other monitors to help offset the cost of it.
Um, but it is a 34 40 by 1440 P resolution, which means that
I am no longer stuck to that.
1920 by 10 80 P resolution, that all my meetings are out on.
My five streaming is at and just about everything else.
So the first issue I ran into is this thing is big.
It has so many pixels and how I'm going to actually manage to do.
All of the different resolutions and window management and stay productive
without looking left or looking.
Right.
So I installed power toys, which has a brand new, awesome
feature called fancy zones.
I want to show off to show you how I manage my windows
and how you can fine tune it.
Regardless if you're live streaming, your coding or doing just about anything.
I love it.
So let's check it out.
All right here we are in the crazy wide screen monitor setup.
As you can see, it is why you probably just got black bars on the
top of bottom of your YouTube video.
Now, if you have been using windows, you know that you can, you know, move over to
the left or to the top of your monitor.
And then you can put something else on the other side and you can even, you
know, adjust this a little bit here.
This is built into windows, nothing special at all.
Of course you can make it bigger, but as you can see here, there's a lot
of white space on different websites.
In fact, if you go to my website, I probably need to update it a little
bit, cause it is pretty narrow here.
Um, and if I snapped to one side.
You know, I may want more than two applications or I forget to tag it.
You know, I, I want to be able to move stuff and put this tab over here and
that tab over here, and now I'm in this.
What about this tab over here?
And, oh my goodness.
Right?
So many things going on, you can really kind of get a hot mess on your screen.
Of course you can always shake it all away and everything goes away.
Shake it back and it all comes back, but that's not what we want to do.
We want to, you know, manage the windows here.
So what we have I'll make this bit is power toys.
Uh, this is something that is from Microsoft.
It's completely for free supported in all sorts of different environments.
And there's all sorts of different, really, really cool tools here.
Um, one of my favorites is actually the color picker.
That you can go in and tap on something and pulls up this color picker there's
fancy zones, upgraded file, explore imagery, sizer, keyboard management, um,
all sorts of just really, really stuff.
Um, Clint over here has a great video on it, but I will say fancy
zones is one of my favorite things.
There's all sorts of good stuff.
Look at this video conference, mute windows and I mean, Kind of awesome.
So you have to install it.
So what you'll do is you will install the power toys from here, and this
will take you to a downloaded XC.
You can use a windows package manager, um, or some other ways of installing it here.
You do have to have a windows 10 and it is built on dotnet core, which is awesome.
And that is built in so nothing else to install there.
So, what does this get you?
Well, if you just run power toys, you get this, this is the
power toys, settings screen.
They have general setup.
I like to always run an admin mode and also run it.
Start-up that's super nice.
It can automatically download updates for you.
And then on the left-hand side, you'll see all of the different, um, Set up here.
I guess I could shake this and boom, there we go.
Um, but you get all the different settings here for us, which is nice here as a color
picker, fancy zones, other things like that, but we are here for fancy zones.
That is my favorite thing to talk about here.
So if you don't set up anything at all, um, what you can do is I make
sure it's enabled by default and let's bring up a browser here, the install,
power toys, and previously I would snap to the left and to the right.
And I guess side by side.
But now I'm going to hold down shift and hit the top here.
And you see that zones one, two, and three, right on my monitor.
And I can snap to it and boom, it's right there.
Put it here.
It's right there.
I bring up power toys, put it over here by bringing up the shell here.
Go ahead and make sure I get my shell open here.
Bam.
And now windows Azure storage Explorer wants to open bam right in the middle.
Right.
So I'm able to easily snap all of my windows wherever I want.
Now I'm using one of the pre-made zones here, but let me show you what you can do.
I'm going to go ahead and minimize this again.
And then let's just snap the fancy zones right here under fancy zones.
There's all sorts of different things.
Highlight colors, opacity, all sorts of different things.
You can exclude specific applications if you want, and you can really fine
tune this and you can see here, I can even hit windows tick to bring
up the editor that we see here.
You can also come in and just say, launch editor.
But you can kind of bring that up in multiple modes.
If I do windows tick, then boom.
Here it is.
Now the fancy zones editor lets you do all sorts of awesome stuff by
default, there are some templates so you can have rows and columns and it'll
split it up for you automatically.
This one's cool priorities zones.
Let's use that one here.
Okay.
So here's a priority zone with four.
So if I was to bring up power toys again, hold down.
Shift.
Boom.
Right.
Being a bring back up my browser.
Boom.
Maybe you want to have Spotify or something to the left or to the right.
Boom.
And it automatically resizes everything for you just by holding down shift.
It is simply fantastical.
I love it.
All right.
Well, let's go back into the editor because there's a lot more.
Now let's say that you love one of these.
So for example, I love this three tier one.
I use this one all the time and you want to modify it.
You can modify an ax selected theme, or you can create your
own completely custom one.
Here.
You can have your own one.
So let's say I want to go in here and I want to hit edit you.
Get into this editor mode now.
Okay.
And then what you're able to do is resize, whatever zone you want here.
Like this, you can add new zones here.
If you want, you can split it up into different categories.
You can create as many.
Hubs and zones as your heart desires.
And I can hit save here and look at all these zones, the zones I can hit apply.
I can hit a custom here's my custom layout hit, apply and close.
And now look at all of those zones.
So you can automatically have these for just about anything, your heart desires.
I mean, this is.
I don't know.
It's pretty much amazing.
Of course your applications need to respect specific sizes that are there.
As we can see, like edge, doesn't like to be that small.
So you might want to, you know, take that into consideration,
but you can really fine tune.
Just about anything inside of here.
So I have one, that's a mobile specific one.
I have different layouts.
This is my main zone.
I absolutely love it.
And you can, of course even control your other monitors.
So on this monitor to the left, I actually do two rows and I hit
apply some applying this to it.
You can't really see it cause it's my other monitor over here, but it's here.
Now, if you wanted to create one from scratch, you can of course do that.
So I'd go to custom, create a new layout and, um, let's go ahead
and say, edit selected layout, and you just add new zones.
You can move it around, make it as big, or as small as you want.
Add another zone it'll snap, or you can overlap totally up to you.
And here I'm just going to make this zone, you know, put his own over here.
Made this a little bit bigger.
Let's add another zone over here.
And really fine tune exactly how you want it.
So I'll make that a little bit bigger, one more zone over here, and it does a great
job of navigating and snapping for you.
There we go.
Hit apply.
Boom.
I have my zone.
I can edit that again.
And once I have it here, of course I can, I can make edits to it and
do anything I want super duper nice.
And that is fancy zones as part of, you know, Power toys,
which is completely for free.
You get all sorts of other stuff too, that you should really tap into, but there
you have it fancy zones, really helping optimize, especially wide screen devices.
So check it out.
Well, there, you have it.
That is how you can leverage power toys and fancy zones to
really manage all of your windows.
If you have a wide screen monitor, I do think that this tool is great.
Even if you don't have a widescreen monitor, maybe you just have a simple,
you know, 1920 by 10 80, like I've had for many, many, many years.
Uh, and you want to kind of put your code on one side or your browser
on one side, a meeting on another.
You can really fine tune it.
It's also really great with multiple monitors.
Especially if you're doing a portrait mode like I have on my other side,
I actually have a zone up top in a zone and on bottom you can download
it completely for free for windows.
I love it.
Um, it's great.
Anyways, I hope that you enjoyed this video and until next time, don't forget to
subscribe and hit that notification bell.
So you can stay up to date with all the videos I put out here.
And finally, of course I do live coding.
If you're interested in that, over on Twitch, on Fridays at
twitch.tv/james Bonta Magno.
Thanks for watching and have a go.