Resizing and Moving Windows

Overview

At least to me, the impossibility to resize a window but by its right bottom corner always seemed a big hurdle limiting the ergonomy and Mac OS X ease of use: consider there's a window near to the right edge of the screen, and you want to make it bigger: the standard way, you have to drag it further from the edge, only then resize it–repeating it possibly many times, until the window size is about right!

That's why OCSmart Hacks allows a window to be resized by any edge, including even the top one. As an added benefit, if you happen to have a two-buttons mouse, you can drag a window not just by its title, but–using the right mouse button and with ⌘–by any point inside.

User Interface

Hold the ctrl-⇧ modifiers (or another combination you have chosen, see "Customization" below), and drag, starting near to any window edge (by default "near to" means less than 16 pixels, the distance is customizable, too). If the window is resizable, the cursor image would change to remind you of the state, and you can resize the window

in width with the right edge for anchor, if you clicked near to the left edge;
in width with the left edge for anchor, if you clicked near to the right edge (see picture);
in height with the top edge for anchor, if you clicked near to the bottom edge;
in height with the bottom edge for anchor, if you clicked near to the top edge;
in both width and height with the opposite corner for anchor, if you clicked near to a corner (see picture):

There is one exception to the cursor image changes: if you click the bottom right corner of the window, the standard Mac OS X code for resizing is used–and, therefore, the mouse cursor does not change.

Note that if you resize the window using its top edge of any of its top corners, it would move somewhat wildly and erratically; always though it would end in the proper position and size if you, for a moment, stop dragging. The reason is that first the Window Server moves the window (since it is de-facto dragged by its title), and only after that I can bring the window back to the proper place and size.

To move a window by its content area (not just its title, but plain anywhere) just hold the ⌘ modifier and right-drag (i.e., drag using the right mouse button) the window wherever you want to, using any point inside the window frame. In case the window happens to belong to the active application, the "closed hand" cursor would be shown whilst dragging. Note that you can move this way also torn-off menus (see the appropriate Help page).

Customization

To customize the resizing details, open the OCSmart Hacks window selecting the "OCSmart Hacks..." item from the application menu, and choose its "Window" tab. The appropriate widgets are placed in the middle area, labelled "Resizing by any window edge":

You can select any combination of modifiers to trigger resizing. Note though that if you select "no modifiers", you will not be able to click near to the window's edge (for such a click would be instead interpreted as resizing); in some cases it may be quite inconvenient. At the very least, if you decide to switch off all the modifiers, it is recommended to set the "Width of the active area..." below to a small number (4-6 pixels at the most).

Also, note that if you choose ⌘ only, you will not be able to resize a window by its top edge or top corners, for the window title along with the ⌘ modifier would perform ordering instead (see the "Ordering Windows" Help page for details).

The "Width of the active area from the edge" textfield allows you to change the size of the rectangle into which you may click to resize a window: the more pixels, the easier to resize, for you don't need to aim too precisely to the window edge. You can enter a zero here to switch the feature off.

These settings are shared by all the applications (different users though, of course, can have different settings). If you change the setting in one application, it may take some time before other running applications notice; to ensure they did, you may want to open the OCSmart Hacks panel in them.