Double Parity

Earlier today, I installed the Pidgin IM client on Vista. When I ran the program for the first time, the upper half of the contact list was off the top of my screen! I wish I had taken a screenshot, but I didn’t, so hopefully my verbal description suffices.

Anyway, with the upper half of the window missing, I couldn’t drag the window back into view. After being frustrated for a bit, I stumbled onto the rather obvious solution. Simply right-click on the program’s tab in the taskbar and select Move. Now, you can use the keyboard’s arrow keys to move the window. Furthermore, after the first keypress, the mouse cursor automatically binds itself to the application’s title bar. So you can switch back to the mouse to drag, rather than holding down the arrow keys. Clicking a mouse button releases the window.

Though I’ve never had this happen to me on a Mac, both Windows and OS X limit window dragging to the title bar, so it’s a potential issue in both environments. Using the taskbar, the Windows solution is simple and, in retrospect, obvious. I looked around for a way to move windows via the keyboard in OS X, but didn’t find one. Google did provide an alternative solution – an AppleScript snippet by Marc Abramowitz that relocates the window to the top-left corner of the screen. If anyone discovers a simpler solution, please let me know. Otherwise, we’ll have to chalk this up as one of the rare instances where Windows bests OS X.