Introduction

Welcome to Virtual Dimension: a free, fast, and feature-full virtual desktop manager for Windows platform. The main goal of this open-source project is indeed to enhance the Microsoft "Window Manager" up to the level of usual Unix Window Manager, by providing virtual desktops, as well as some additional features, like always on top, window shading...

I guess those already used to working with any flavor of Unix and X11 have already understood the interest of such a project. In my opinion, anybody who used it for more than a couple of minutes may find it hard to revert to a single desktop. However, some people, most probably Windows users, may not understand what this is.

So, first of all, what is a virtual desktop? Simply said, a "desktop" is what you see when you run windows: the actual windows desktop, with the icons on it; some open windows; some minimized windows. The main goal of the project is thus to allow working with only some of the applications visible at a time. Later, some other windows may be visible. The program thus allows to have a few set of applications/windows, where you can simply choose which group is visible, and switch between one group or the other.

Now, one may ask what is the interest of such a thing ? Well, this is quite simple. If you only have a few windows open at any time, I guess there isn't much interest. However, if you are working with lots of applications, you desktop can easily become overcrowded: you lose time finding your windows, taskbar buttons are too small for you to read the text and find the right window, using drag and drop becomes a nightmare... The solution is Virtual Dimension.

Indeed, using Virtual Dimension, you could have all your chat and irc windows on one virtual desktop; your email client and browser windows on another; and your text editor and debugger on a third one. This way, you only have what you need before you, yet you can easily switch to another desktop when you need to access the other applications...

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Features

Add a new dimension to your Windows environment with multiple desktops:

Feeling lost with all your desktops ? Virtual Dimension has powerful features to help you:

The preview window is a powerful tool which allows you to get the most out of Virtual Dimension:

Additionally, Virtual Dimension allows you to access special features:

In order to access all those features in a more convenient fashion, and thus work faster, Virtual Dimension can optionally integrate with the shell. This allows to access many operations with a single click, as if they were supported directly by Windows !

Virtual Dimension allows you to change many settings on your applications. Maybe you like this transparent shell. Or you want your email client to be always visible, whatever desktop you are on. To make your life easier, Virtual Dimension allows you to:

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Screenshots


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Virtual Dimension in action ! Where you can see:

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Requirements

The aim is to have the program be as portable and compatible as possible. However, some functionalities may not be available on all platform. Provided you got a decently recent version of Internet Explorer, it should work just fine.

The application is expected to run on Windows 98/Me as well as NT/2000/XP. It may also work just fine on Windows 95. Note however that transparency is only supported on Windows 2000/XP

If you test the application, please let me know if it does not work on your platform, including a somewhat detailed description of what happens.

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License

Virtual Dimension, Copyright (C) 2003 Francois Ferrand. Licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Virtual Dimension comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. See the GNU General Public License for details.

The virtual dimension logo was kindly contributed by agr3kko, based on a GPL icon from the Redhat theme "Bluecurve", by Garrett LeSage.

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Download

Virtual Dimension is an open source project, distributed under the GNU Public License terms. See details of the GPL to find out your rights. You are greatly encourage to distribute the application

The project is hosted on SourceForge, thus allowing the source to be accessed through CVS. See this page for details

Latest version is 0.94, released July 9, 2005. Download it here.
You can also download previous binary versions at this location

Installation is quite straightforward: just decompress the archive to the desired installation location. That's it, Virtual Dimension is ready to run: just run the exe file !