Boxer

2017-03-24 21:57  boxer      [permalink]

Drats. I thought I'll try something like Clover does, start with SetParent on any top-level window you could find with GetAncestor(GetForegroundWindow,GA_ROOT) and see what it gives. There's this old default MDI child mechanic that starts working, so I thought this might just work. But it looks like over at Microsoft the Windows 10 team decided to cut some corners. The theming doesn't do it's modern stuff and reverts to Vista-style borders, and the newfangled calulator, for example, won't even take the SetParent nicely any more. Oh well. For the time I'm still on Windows 7 at work, I guess it'll come in handy there for the time being. Probably in about a week I'll know if this could work where other desktop-management tools failed or were too cumbersome or too invasive...

How does it work? Boxer starts with an empty window, and will show an icon over the top-right corner of other windows. Click that to 'box' the window. The top bar shows a tab for each boxed window. Right-click to open a menu with options to unbox or close, and drag to reorder. Multiple instances play nice with each-other and show 'boxing handles'  next to eachother, the second instance labeled "A", the third "B", etc. To disable the boxing handles, right-click on the top bar to the right of all tabs.

Anyway, if you feel like having a try if you can do better, have a look at the code here. Download a binary here: Boxer.zip (209KB)

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