Keyboard shortcuts lets you quickly move windows around, without even touching the mouse.

MaxTo has a long range of built-in keyboard shortcuts, backed by its powerful recipes. In this tutorial we will explain how the default keyboard shortcuts work, and how you can use them most effectively.

Keyboard shortcuts are just recipes

I know we haven't gotten to the recipes chapter yet, but its important to note that all of MaxTo's default keyboard shortcuts are just recipes. This means that you can edit them, and that after an upgrade of MaxTo you may need to export the recipes you want to keep, and then reset your recipes (Restore defaults, For this tab under Settings, Recipes).

Placing windows into regions

MaxTo overrides some of the default Windows shortcuts, specifically the

arrow keys
shortcuts. These are the shortcuts you are most likely to be familiar with already, as they have been built into Windows since Windows 7.

But although the actual keys your press are the same, what happens when you press them isn't. Here is an overview:

Keyboard shortcut What it does in MaxTo
Move the active window to the closest region to its left.
 Move the active window to the closest region to its right.
 Move the active window to the closest region above.
 Move the active window to the closest region below.

Windows' default keyboard shortcuts vary what they do based on the state of the window, so on the first press of

, the window occupies the left half, on the second press the right half, and the third press the window goes back to its original position. With MaxTo, the behavior is more consistent; the window will go to the region to the left.

Swapping windows

When you use the move keyboard shortcuts above, only the foreground window is affected. If you are in a situation where you need to see all the windows at once, using the swap keyboard shortcuts is more interesting.

Keyboard shortcut What it does in MaxTo
Alt
Swap the active window with the windows in the closest region to its left.
Alt
Swap the active window with the windows in the closest region to its right.
Alt
Swap the active window with the windows in the closest region above.
Alt
Swap the active window with the windows in the closest region below.

Grid placement New in 2.1.0

In the early 2000s, a Windows utility called WinSplit Revolution gained some popularity. WinSplit, as it was known by its fans, laid out a 3x3 grid that mapped to your numpad. Each numpad corresponded to an anchor location around that point on the screen. So, pressing

Control Alt NumPad3
would place the window in the lower right corner of the screen, covering a quarter of the screen area.

Repeatedly pressing the same shortcut key would make the window larger (to cover 2/3s of the screen horizontally), then smaller (to cover 1/3 of the screen horizontally).

MaxTo supports this functionality since version 2.1.0, after considerable user feedback. It was also important to us that WinSplit Revolution has been discontinued, and had stopped working for quite a few users due to changes in Windows since it was developed.

Here is a summary of the WinSplit keyboard shortcuts MaxTo supports out of the box:

Control Alt 7

Anchor: Top left

  • 1/2 width
  • 2/3 width
  • 1/3 width
Control Alt 8

Anchor: Top

  • Full width
  • 1/3 width (centered)
Control Alt 9

Anchor: Top right

  • 1/2 width
  • 2/3 width
  • 1/3 width
Control Alt 4

Anchor: Left

  • 1/2 width
  • 2/3 width
  • 1/3 width
Control Alt 5

Anchor: Center

  • Full screen
  • 2/3 width (centered)
  • 1/3 width (centered)
Control Alt 6

Anchor: Right

  • 1/2 width
  • 2/3 width
  • 1/3 width
Control Alt 1

Anchor: Bottom left

  • 1/2 width
  • 2/3 width
  • 1/3 width
Control Alt 2

Anchor: Bottom

  • Full width
  • 1/3 width (centered)
Control Alt 3

Anchor: Bottom right

  • 1/2 width
  • 2/3 width
  • 1/3 width

Oh, and one more thing

There is one keyboard shortcut that doesn't fit neatly into the above sections. To center a window on your screen quickly, without resizing it, you can press

Alt C
.

If you want to create your own keyboard shortcuts, you can do that through the powerful recipes feature. All of the keyboard shortcuts are implemented using recipes, so in addition to letting you easily change the keyboard shortcuts, but you can also add additional actions. See the tutorial on recipes for more details.

What's next