5.19.2010

Application review: Divvy

Apps that reduce my mouse usage are my bread and butter. I'm a keyboard shortcut freak so any time I can accomplish a task with a keystroke instead of a mouse movement, I do. One of the things that has always driven me nuts was having to re-size my windows manually to fit my current workflow. I've been using SizeUp to alleviate this problem for some time now. Recently though, I've been turned onto a new player in the window management game. Meet Divvy.

Divvy is a menu bar app that stays out of the way until you call up the interface where you can just click and drag on the grid to resize the currently selected window. The hotkey to call up the panel can be customized but comes as Command-Shift-Spacebar. While the panel is open you can tap Command to further sub-divide the grid. This give you a quick and easy way to resize all those windows on your screen.

This alone would make this app awesome but you can also assign keyboard shortcuts to access commonly used window arrangements and sizes. Say you want to be able to set any window to 30% of the screen to the left. Call up the Divvy panel and click the gear icon in the top right. Click the Shortcuts tab and click New (or Command-N). Drag out the window size you want, give it a name, and assign a shortcut (I used the number). Now whenever you call up the panel and hit the 1 key your window will resize to 30% of the left of the screen, immediately. You can create as many of these shortcuts as you want to allow for an infinite number of possible arrangements.

I am going to continue using both SizeUp and Divvy as a complete solution to window nirvana. SizeUp has the ability to move windows from monitor to monitor and from Space to Space (I'll be covering SizeUp in a future post) using the keyboard alone so I'll keep using it for that. Divvy allows me more customization of available window dimensions so it will allow me to fine-tune everything. It's unfortunate I'm so broke right now because this software is well worth the $14.00. I'll be snapping up a licensed copy as soon as I get paid again. Seriously, check it out. You won't know what you did before.


1 comment:

  1. Dave,
    This looks very cool. I too hate the mouse. Are you into Keyboard Maestro?

    Lamike

    ReplyDelete

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