goScreen

Virtual Desktop Manager for Microsoft® Windows


All features at a glance

Visual appearance:

  • Change size, position, fonts, colors of goScreen user interface windows,
  • Assign names to screen pages,
  • Assign icons to screen pages, using ones from separate files or extracting them from other applications.

Screen pages:

  • Create up to 80 screen pages, assigning to each of them specific desktop color and wallpaper picture.
  • Put pages in numerical, alphabetical or custom order.
  • Copy or pull page configuration settings from one page to another.

Operation:

  • Define specific keyboard hot key to activate a screen page,
  • Hide screen pages, which provides with a kind of security mechanism,
  • Define "sticky" windows that show on all screen pages,
  • Assign a window to a specific page, or to several of them,
  • Relocate application windows from one screen page to another,
  • Define preferred placement of application windows and restore it with a single keystroke or mouse click,
  • Use layout manager to find a window you need, or to show the desktop,
  • Perform some actions (close, mimimize, maximize, restore) for all windows on the current page.
  • There is a number of keyboard and mouse shortcuts to goScreen commands, that you might want to define.
  • On multiple monitor systems run multiple instances of goScreen to manage different monitors independently,
  • Create and use different configuration profiles to properly handle different goScreen usage scenarios.

Information:

  • goScreen provides with a comprehensive information about running applications and defined hot keys with simple "just move the mouse in" mechanism.
  • Try also its Page information display functionality - similar to displaying the channel number on TV screen, but much more flexible.

In some cases there is more than one way to do the same thing. Expect the best. GoScreen can help you to create a completely personalized desktop, which lets you use your computer resources at fullest and save your time.

How it works?

There is no magic. There are two Windows API functions that make goScreen possible: ShowWindow and GetWindowText. So, as long as Microsoft supports this sort of interprocess communication, goScreen will work. When you go from one screen page to another, goScreen just hides all visible windows on the previous page and shows ones on the next. Hiding and showing a window is a legal operation and all applications should react properly - for example, redraw itself properly. It is one of the major requirements in developing for Microsoft® Windows. Of course, there is no guaranty of how fast they will respond. Here I depend on them - if they are slow, please do not blame me. Also this explains sometimes bizarre behavior of other applications - they might call ShowWindow themselves, or not call it when it would be nice to do so.

GoScreen does not monitor Windows shell activity - this would require installing Windows hooks, which I believe is unsafe. For example, when one double clicks a file in Windows Explorer, shell finds in the registry what application can open this file, starts this application and commands it to open the file. GoScreen is not involved in this scenario.

GoScreen has no initiative. It can do many things, but only when you command it to do so. That is, as long as you do not touch goScreen, it does not touch your system.