Rescuing a Window that’s Stuck Off-Screen

Last week, during the MSDN Roadshow stop in Reston, VA, I helped my fellow presenter Dani Diaz get a wayward Fiddler window back on-screen, after it appeared off-screen when he opened the app during a demo.

Folks on hand wanted to know what keyboard shortcut I used, and I just realized that I misspoke at the time as to what the shortcut was…I had said it was alt+shift, when in fact, the keyboard shortcut I used was alt+space. alt+space brings up the window menu for the currently selected window, even if that window is currently off-screen, and the menu will appear on-screen regardless.

So if you run into a situation where you open an application, and the window does not appear on-screen, use alt+tab to switch to that application, then alt+space to open the window menu. Once that menu is open, one of the options should be Move. Select move, and then use the arrow keys to start moving the window…it should immediately pop into view, and once you’ve started the move with the arrow keys you can then move it where you want it with the mouse.

Apologies to the folks who attended the event and who may have been misled by my earlier statement.

One more thing…I mentioned during my talk on Windows 7 for developers that there are a ton of new keyboard shortcuts in Windows 7 that you might be interested in…here’s one list:

https://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/Windows7/Keyboard-shortcuts

If you’d like to see more lists you can, of course, Bing it.