One of the best features of a Mac computer desktop is Mission Control, a way to see open windows on the screen all together or to hide and display the desktop without having to iconize them one by one. In Windows, of course, you can always see the desktop by pressing the corresponding button in the taskbar and you can see all the windows open by pressing the Alt-Tab key combination.
A nice and useful tool for Windows 7 and also Windows 10 and Windows 8, allows you to take advantage of the corners of the screen to get an overview of all open windows and programs so you can quickly select them or close those that are not needed .
If you open several web browser windows, you can see the various sites all together on the screen simply by moving the mouse to a corner of the screen.
Update: In Windows 10 you can use the FancyZones tool of Microsoft Powertoys for Windows 10 to be able to choose a layout of the windows to be able to see them all together . You can then choose a vertical arrangement of 3 or 4 windows that are automatically resized to enter the reserved space.
The small tool SmallWindows allows you to add Mission Control on Windows. SmallWindows is free, open source and requires installation on the computer in order to use it.
At first start you can choose whether to enable SmallWindows permanently. The choice to start SmallWindows when the computer is turned on can also be made subsequently from the options menu which opens by pressing the program icon at the bottom right near the clock.
By default, when the program is running, you can move the mouse cursor to the upper left corner to see all the thumbnails of the windows open together . The windows automatically arrange themselves in space according to their proportions. By clicking on one of them you can view it normally while typing on the keyboard you can search for a window by title. If you move the mouse to the lower left corner, you will only see the thumbnails of the programs related to the open window.
Basically, if you are using Google Chrome to view a site and there are other Chrome windows (not tabs) open, you can see these windows all together by moving the mouse to the bottom left. Lower right mouse instead shows the empty desktop.
From the SmallWindows options you can change the actions that can be activated in the corners of the screen and move the various actions for a better performance, also taking advantage of the top right corner. You can also configure a keyboard shortcut to see all the window thumbnails, without using the mouse. Another useful feature on the settings page is that you can exclude certain programs or windows from the thumbnail view.
SmallWindows is a great tool that works well despite the developer having not released any updates in the past year.
In another article I had also reported Win7SE for the quick selection of windows from the corners of the screen
