If like me you have two monitors connected to your MS-Windows laptop at work, I am sure you have experienced the nuisance of “loosing” your application windows. Basically, the window manager appears to be smart enough to remember a window position, i.e., which monitor it was on last, but too dumb to realize that that monitor might not be connected sometimes, e.g., when using the laptop in a conference room. If you open up an application that was previously on the second monitor, it will open but not be visible.
Closing and opening does not help, and in the past, the only thing that would help was to put my laptop back into the docking station. Of course, this is not feasible if you are in a meeting, away from your desk, and need that particular app to run “visibly”. Here’s how to fix this:
- Right click on the application in the taskbar. If it is maximized on the not visible monitor, click the first item in the context menu, namely Restore. Without this, it cannot be moved.
- Next, right click again in the taskbar and select Move. This will move the mouse pointer to the center of the application window’s title bar. You won’t be able to see this, but simply click the left mouse button, and then move the mouse until the window becomes visible.
Congratulations, you just rescued the window! You can try to do this blindly, w/o the move command, but I have tried it many times w/o success. The method described here is foolproof.