VirtuaWin Review – The Virtual Desktop Manager

It’s been couple of days now since I last reviewed a piece of software so I guess it’s time. This time I am going to review a tidy little application called VirtuaWin.

VirtuaWin is a virtual desktop manager for the Windows operating system that allows you to manage multiple applications over virtual desktops (or workspaces). Some of you might be familiar with this idea if you’ve used one of the many flavors of Linux.

Main thing I love about this app is the size. The binary is only 382kb and downloads in just a few seconds. It’s also very easy to configure. The only tuning I had to do was name the four virtual desktops I was going to use and assign them each a hot key. I’ve set VirtuaWin up to use the Windows Key plus the numbers 1 through 4 (respective to the virtual desktop I created).

There are many of options that can be set but really the name and hot keys were all I had to do to get it going . One option I would consider setting up is the mouse functions. You can set VirtuaWin to let the mouse direct which virtual desktop is selected. I did try it out and it was pretty awsome. When I would move the mouse off the right side of the screen it would move over one virtual desktop and when I moved the mouse off the bottom of the screen under the taskbar it would go down one virtual desktop. OK so my terminology is a little off but if you look at the screen shot that shows the little tray icon you will see what I mean. It’s separated into four quadrants.

On the VirtuaWin website you can find a bunch of add-ons (called modules) and icon sets. It’s a very configurable and customizable program.
The one and only thing that I was able to find that I didn’t like was the sheer amount of settings. You can get quite involved in tweaking. My personal preference is dead simple and I’m not a huge fan of tweaking. I prefer to run things more or less “out of the box”. Anyway, once I figured out which options I needed to change I was all set to go in just a matter of minutes. It took me a lot longer to write this post than it did to figure out how to use the program.

You can get VirtuaWin here.