On the “good” old XP this required some trickery and knowledge of window specific shortcuts, but on more recent version of Windows this has become really easy to do.
So if you run into a situation where an application’s window is outside your visible area, because you disconnected a second screen for example and the app doesn’t automatically snap to the only screen left, simply do this:
- Keep the Windows key pressed and hit the cursor key left or right.
Your window will simply snap back to your current screen and all is well.
Using it with the up & down arrow will maximize or minimize the active window. Always handy to know those shortcuts if you have both hands on the keyboard anyway.
If this doesn’t work because the window cannot be resized, you can also try this, but it’s a bit more tricky:
- Activate the application by clicking it in the taskbar.
- Hold the Alt key, and press the space bar.
A context menu will pop up now, where the first option is to move the window. - Navigate down 1 entry by using pressing the down cursor-key once.
- Hit Enter.
- Now you can move the Window with the cursor keys left, right, up & down.
As soon as you use a cursor key to move the window, your mouse locks on to it as well. So you can now use the mouse as well to move it back into visual range.
If this doesn’t seem to work straight away, try it out on an application like Notepad first, so you get the hang of it.
Photo by Dean Hochman, cc-licensed.
One reply on “how to move an unreachable window on windows 7, 8 or 10”
Simple solution; I would like it to have worked for a WSL.