{"id":17313,"date":"2009-07-29T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-07-29T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2009\/07\/29\/how-do-i-put-a-window-at-the-edge-of-the-screen-without-triggering-the-automatic-positioning-behavior\/"},"modified":"2025-10-19T19:39:27","modified_gmt":"2025-10-20T02:39:27","slug":"20090729-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20090729-00\/?p=17313","title":{"rendered":"How do I put a window at the edge of the screen without triggering the automatic positioning behavior?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last time, we saw that Windows\u00a07 lets you position windows to fill the left or right half of the screen by just dragging the window to the appropriate edge<\/a>. (This also works for the top and bottom half of the screen.) But what if you just want a window near the edge without the automatic positioning?<\/p>\n

Just grab the window from the far edge.<\/p>\n

The auto-positioning behavior is triggered by the mouse position, not the window position. (This is hinted at in the animation that accompanies the docking: The ripple effect is centered on the mouse, not the window. Here are more details on Aero Snap design<\/a>.) If you don’t want auto-positioning to kick in, just keep the mouse away from the edge of the screen. For example, suppose you want to place a window against the left edge of the screen, but you don’t want the automatic positioning to kick in. Just grab the caption bar by the area near the minimize\/maximize\/close buttons, then drag the window to the left edge of the screen. Since you grabbed it from the right-hand part of the caption, you can position the window freely without the mouse getting anywhere near the edge of the screen.<\/p>\n

Similarly, if you want to position a window near the right edge, grab it near the left hand part of the caption bar (near the caption icon).<\/p>\n

If this feature offends you so much that you would rather have it permanently disabled, you can do so from Control Panel<\/i> | Ease of Access Center<\/i> | Make the mouse easier to use<\/i> | Prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to the edge of the screen<\/i>. (Note that this is a dreaded negative checkbox<\/a>. It should have been phrased Arrange windows automatically when moved to the edge of the screen<\/i>.) As a shortcut for those first three steps, you can hit the Windows key and then type better mouse<\/i> into the Start menu search box, then click Change how your mouse works<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Grab it far from the edge you care about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[104],"class_list":["post-17313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-tipssupport"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Grab it far from the edge you care about.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}