One of the most frustrating things I experience because I have my laptop connected to a second monitor is that when I disconnect it, my windows don’t always come back to the laptop monitor. I can see all of my applications in the taskbar, but when I click on some of them, they won’t appear. It gets frustrating, but this happens because they’re “popping-up” on the secondary monitor that’s not there anymore. Sometimes it just doesn’t realize that there’s not a 2nd monitor anymore, but thankfully there’s any easy way to fix it. Today we’ll explain how to move windows with your keyboard, even if you can’t actually see them on your screen.
As an example, we’ll say that I just disconnected my 2nd monitor from my laptop, and now I clicked on Firefox from my taskbar, but it won’t appear. To get the Firefox window back on my laptop, I just have to right click on Firefox in the taskbar and select “move.”
Once the “move” cursor appears (it looks like this:
) you can do one of two things. Obviously I can’t see where the Firefox Window is to move the cursor to but I could take a stab in the dark and move the mouse to where I think it would be on the “other” screen and then click and more it back. Or, I could take the simple route and use the keyboard arrows to move it. Just hold down the left or right arrow and the window will come sliding across.
You can of course use the “move” tool to simply move windows on your screen instead of dragging them. It doesn’t always have to be used when there’s an issue with an off-screen window. If you decide to do this, you’ll probably want to know that by pressing Ctrl while using the arrow keys, your window will move much slower and more precisely. This could be useful for lining up windows. You can also press escape at any point while you’re moving the window and it will go back to the location it was at before you started to move it. Nice, huh?
I’ve used this tool regularly ever since I hooked my laptop up to a 2nd monitor to work, and now I can’t imagine not having it there for me to use because it’s that useful. Hopefully this will be helpful for some of you…
Source: the How-To Geek
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Or, instead of holding the arrow key, just move your mouse on the visible/current monitor after pressing Arrow key once ( alt+space>m>arrow key>move mouse)
Although I knew this trick, your post will make me actually use it. Thanks.
It works for (re)size too! And as Ayush pointed out, once if you move/resize it using the keyboard, then the window sticks to the mouse cursor and simply moving the cursor without holding down the mouse button will move the window too!