VirtuaWin 2.11

VirtuaWin

Version Reviewed: 2.11
Date Reviewed: 2005-10-15
Home: http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/
Cost: Free (GPL)

Promising, but weird. It is barebones by design, but there are a number of "modules" that can be plugged in.

There is a very nice little system tray icon from which the whole desktop manager is controlled. The icon shows which desktop is active, and makes it very easy to switch between the desktops. It's easy to set up hot keys for each desktop. (I used Win-1,2,3,4.)

I can't really tell what desktop model the author had in mind. Windows move between desktops a lot, and I don't know why. Seems like dragging things near the edges of the screen will move them around, and moving the mouse toward the edges of the screen takes you to different desktops -- this is annoying.

It's possible I just don't understand the intent. The documentation is sparse and in semi-broken English.

Not all the modules have been kept updated or maybe never worked. I tried some and was disappointed:

• SwitchDesk, a wallpaper module, doesn't seem to work with VirtuaWin 2.11. It just exits with an error during a desktop switch.
• SmartCoolName, which allows names to be assigned and displayed for each desktop, just drew a weird little rectangle on the right side near the task bar with no obvious content.

Source code is available for all this stuff, so maybe I could just fix them to work the way I like! That's attractive.

I'm not giving up on this yet, but it moves to the back of the line. I'd rather not have to write stuff myself -- this is supposed to be a tool I can use, not a new hobby to suck up time.