The Aero Snap feature which appeared in Windows 7, allows you to manage opened windows easily. It has a number of features, one of which, is the ability to dock an opened window to the screen edges. This behavior exists in Windows 10 and Windows 8 as well.
In Windows 7, Microsoft made it easier to tile (snap) windows side-by-side by automatically arranging them when you drag them with the mouse pointer to the top, left or right edges of the screen. Microsoft calls this Aero Snap. In Windows 10, snapping features have been expanded. Windows 10 has Snap Assist, Corner Snap and Snap Fill. Snap Assist prompts you to choose another window to snap immediately after you snap any one of them. Corner Snap is the ability to drag windows to the screen's corners to resize and snap them to the screen's 4 quadrants. Snap Fill is the feature where resizing one window also resizes the other window snapped to it simultaneously to automatically remove any blank space.
Related article: You can disable snapping in Windows 10 but keep other extended window management options
Let's see how to use Snap Fill to resize other snapped windows.
To resize snapped windows simultaneously in Windows 10, do the following.
- Snap two windows to the opposite sides of the Desktop. You can drag one to the left side of the Desktop. Once the pointer touches the left edge, the window will be snapped.
- Pick another window to snap it to the right side.
- Move the pointer to the middle of the screen. There is a thin line between two snapped windows.
- Look for a transparent grey bar that appears above the border. It is a sign that you can start resizing.
- Click and hold the left mouse button and drag the mouse pointer to the left or right to resize one of the windows. A black thick delimiter will appear near the active window. The other window will be resized automatically!
Moving the delimiter bar to the right will reduce the width of the window on the right. And vice versa, moving the delimiter to the left edge will give more room to the window on the right.
Note: The inactive window is not resized live, meaning the change is not visually instant and doesn't follow your mouse pointer's movement. The inactive window’s size will be adjusted once you release the left mouse button.
That's it.
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You must have to have the setting of Snap Assist Turned on first for this to work because it doesn’t work for me on 16299.19, but I have Snap Assist turned off and don’t want to bother enabling it to try.
My computer is only about 2 years old now. It don’t do the automatic resizing once they are snapped together. I feel like it used to do this. Now it doesn’t have the thicker black line between the snapped windows. It happens no matter what I’m snapping. Chrome windows or other programs. It just won’t do it. Could it be that my system needs to be updated or something?