How to increase edge and corner grabbing zone for resizing a window

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My new monitor is 2560 x 1440 and for productivity reasons I like to be able to move my mouse cursor fully from side to side and top to bottom of the screen primarily with finger and wrist movement only. So my mouse cursor speed/sensitivity is set to maximum. The trade-off is it makes it harder to land the pointer accurately on extremely small target areas of the screen. For me, the only time this trade-off is too high is when trying to land on the very narrow edges of desktop windows so I can resize them on the fly. I’ve been living with this for months and finally got frustrated enough to take action.

I couldn’t find any settings in “Windows Settings” or in Control Panel to change the width of the zones for grabbing the edges or corners. Let me know if I’m missing some setting somewhere!

Searching the web was mostly a dead end until I found the following registry edit:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics
Double click on BorderWidth. (Mine was set at “-15” which I think ends up being only 1 or 2 pixels wide?)
Change it to a larger negative number, close regedit and restart the computer to apply the change.

After some testing, I settled on “-160”. The fiddle-factor to grab a window edge has been resolved. And, no, it didn’t change the visual thickness of the windows borders – only the width of the drag zones.

Win10 Pro x64 22H2, Win10 Home 22H2, Linux Mint + a cat with 'tortitude'.

6 users thanked author for this post.

Glucose, RBGeek, A1ex, TechTango, JFarrell, RetiredGeek

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I don’t know how to change the size of the resize handle (well, I do now after reading the post), but perhaps the mouse can be made more friendly. Did you check the box for “enhance pointer precision” in the old, Control Panel settings? That introduces negative pointer acceleration at low speeds, so when you are moving the mouse slowly, it reduces the mouse movement speed to less than the nominal speed (as far as I can tell).

I always used this setting in Windows… tick that first, then set the pointer speed. It makes hitting narrow elements with the mouse far easier when I have a relatively high speed setting, as I do. I like the mouse (an actual mouse, not a touchpad) to move about 3/4 of an inch (19mm) to an inch (25mm) go from the left edge of the screen to the right at low speed. At high speed, it accelerates to about half that.

It’s equally important for touchpads, IMO. I always checked the box for those too.

Incidentally, it is the lack of a setting like this that makes me dislike the libinput driver in Linux for touchpads. I use synaptics instead to get this functionality back.

Edit: I just caught the bit about the cat with tortitude! I have one of those too. She’s a torbie, or perhaps a tabico. She has black, gray, cream, orange, brown stripes on her body and white belly, bib, and paws. Conflicted whether that makes her a tabby+tortie (white belly and bib are a normal color variation of tabby) or a tabico (tabby calico). Love her to pieces either way!

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

1 user thanked author for this post.

Steve S.

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Thanks. I now remember trying that feature early in Win 7. My muscle memory didn’t care for the feeling of ‘deceleration’ as I slowed the cursor when getting close to target or moving the pointer shorter distances. It’s a sort of ‘moving-in-honey’ feel.  I just now tried it in Win 10 and it still feels weird, though it does make the mouse more precise with small movements. I’ll take a few days to see how and if my habits adapt.

I’ve had three tortoise shell cats in succession. All were quite intelligent, eccentric, sometimes demanding yet always engaged companions and ‘playmates’. Our second cat lived to the ripe age of 20 years. She spent those years living with us on our sailboat and sailed with us wherever we went, including from Seattle to Alaska and offshore down to Mexico. Quite the seafarer! Our current tortie, CoCo, has also sailed with us in Mexico. She immediately took to the boat like it was a big Jungle-Jim. She is trained to a harness and wore a life-vest on our passages.. lol!

Win10 Pro x64 22H2, Win10 Home 22H2, Linux Mint + a cat with 'tortitude'.

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I set mine to -250 on my 4K monitor, problem solved, thank you

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“HKEY_CURRENT_USERControl PanelDesktopWindowMetrics
Double click on BorderWidth. (Mine was set at “-15” which I think ends up being only 1 or 2 pixels wide?) Change it to a larger negative number, close regedit and restart the computer to apply the change. After some testing, I settled on “-160”. “.

Steve, thanks for this. It works for this old guy!
Cheers
Chris

Unless you're in a hurry, just wait.

2 users thanked author for this post.

TechTango, Steve S.

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THANK YOU!

So helpful. So easy. This has been vexxing me for years haha

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Excellent tweak. I remember using it long ago but couldn’t remember or find it again until finally stumbling into this place.

Absolutely necessary on 4K monitors. Windoz should just provide a slider in Display settings for this adjustment.

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Thank you for the post! Glad Im not the only one who was bothered by it.

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Used it and thanks for this.

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Hi,

Thanks for this useful tip. This works fine for most windows, however, the Office 365 applications apparently work in a different way. Can these window borders also be set to be less sensitive to mouse gestures?

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I tried this for my touchpad and can see no change.  I’ve tried many times with different numbers.  After some cleanup work by my computer tech all the touchpad movements were much more sensitive–and yes, I set it to “low” but it doesn’t seem to help.  (It’s making me crazy! :))

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Old thread but I noticed long ago that this tweak doesn’t change the drag zone size at the TOP of windows, only on the left, right and lower edges. So, I’ve learned the habit of not using the top edge of a window for resizing.

For the fun of it, I may at some point try playing with some of the other settings in the “WindowsMetrics” part of the registry – exporting a backup of that section first, of course!

As for Office 365 and touchpads, I use neither. So, I’m of no help there.

 

Win10 Pro x64 22H2, Win10 Home 22H2, Linux Mint + a cat with 'tortitude'.

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Yes, I was hoping your tweak would work on the top line.   I’m looking for this too.   Thank you for the help with the other edges.   Very much appreciated.

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Has anyone come up with a solution to increasing the top border grab zone? Excel is my primary concern. I always have to drag it to a different screen, to grab the bottom and make it smaller.

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Try, Win-key+Shift+Arrow (left or right as necessary) to mone the Active window to another screen.

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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I suddenly cannot grab the corners on my second and third monitor…. This has never been an issue so I am not sure what happened. Do you have any thoughts? I have tried so many things to correct it.

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You can never grab corners of a window if it’s maximized, so click the “windows” icon just to the left of the close X, then try again with the corners.

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After using this “tweak” I will say it did and didn’t work. It did increase the grab area for Firefox but then I tried it on an open Excel document and my grab area is small. I’m confused on how it can work for one window but not another. Any ideas?

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I came here because the issue is with Office365 windows, which seem to have exactly ONE pixel to grab hold of for some reason, which on my small 4k monitor is basically impossible.  Other windows seem ok…

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Excellent fix to a problem that has bugged me for a few years (since upgrade to 4k laptop display)! I settled on -80 due to multiple monitors with different resolutions. The -160 drag border on the lower res displays was as wide as the window title bar which made it hard to drag the whole window. Note that with my display driver/ video card you can see the width of the drag border as you drag the window or resize the borders. Makes it fairly easy to see how it will impact dragging vs resizing.

Thanks a million!

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You can convert the twips (twentieth of an inch point) unit value to pixels here:
https://www.unitconverters.net/typography/twip-to-pixel-x.htm

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I also increased the Padded border width and the 2 together made a huge difference.

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The registry hack to increase the “grab zone” works great! Thank you!

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The registry setting is working. But not for the top border of MS Office windows (Word and Excel). Is there a special setting for this?

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If I find one I’ll let you know… wouldn’t be surprised if it’s in a special place like under HKCU\microsoft\office keys maybe, that’s an example not gospel.  I’d like to know the answer to that one myself.

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Tried BorderWidth=-160 which did make the edge grab area bigger and easier to grab. But, one of my apps (VSCode) was adversely affected. Was not able to open main menus unless clicked at the very bottom of the button (dropdown area). I guess the top window grab area conflicted with the menu button. I guess a non-standard app. Anyway, I changed BorderWidth to -30 to achieve best of both worlds. The window grab area is bigger and easier to grab and the VSCode menu is only affected at the very top of the menu button. I guess I’ll live with that.

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This solution worked well… Thanks

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Unfortunately I use autohide taskbar and increasing the size of the BorderWidth makes the  “hidden” taskbar more and more visible. They should have made the taskbar settings completely separate from other windows.

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Thanks so much for finding and posting the path to the registry keys.

Everything that makes Linux great can almost all be found in the registry keys, they (Microsoft) just make it harder than it needs to be. Linux is way easier to tweak, plus they let you tweak more stuff too. Windoze be like, for example here, we’re gonna make an app folder that not even your system account can see into. It’s for “security”…

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Thank you very much for posting this info. Makes it MUCH easier. MS should not make these things require registry edits.

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You’re a god, thank you

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Thanks!

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Man thank you, I waas getting crazy. -250 is perfect!!

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I don’t want to be rude and say this is BS because evidently there must be a reason why on my setup it does not work. On my PC (Win 10) if I change Border Width to -150 the sizing area remains the same but I get much a taller window bars (caption or how you call it). Mystery.

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Maybe you set the wrong registry value?
What value did you change?

cheers, Paul

1 user thanked author for this post.

TechTango

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I too have tried this fix before and it (still) doesn’t work for me.  (Win10 Pro) I will note that Excel 2016 has adequate ‘hot’ widths but most (e.g., FireFox) don’t.  Later I will try a Restart. I don’t think that has been mentioned as being needed.

 

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The very first post, but you have to read carefully! 

Steve S. wrote:

Change it to a larger negative number, close regedit and restart the computer to apply the change.

cheers, Paul

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