On a typical Windows PC, there are dozens of windows open at any time. These windows belong to various processes and applications running on your system. Some of these windows are in foreground, others are in background. These windows could be hidden or visible. Then these windows could have maximized, minimized or normal states. Sometimes, we wish to have an application through which we can control all of these windows from one place. Fortunately there is an open source application called auWin using which we can do exactly that.
auWin is a portable application for Windows that allows us to manage or control all the open windows. It can control its own window too but there is an option to prevent that.
auWin works in two steps – first find the window and then send control signal to that window. It has a user interface that offers many different ways of finding a window. For example, you can locate a window using the title text, process ID, or the window handle (HWND). We can also select all of the open windows instead of searching for a single or a group of windows.
Once we have specified a criteria of finding a window using auWin, we can select an action that is to be taken on the found windows. Different actions are available such as – display, display handle, flash, send close signal, send kill signal, hide, show, minimize, maximize, restore, disable, enable, set on top, set not on top, set transparency, set title, move, resize, display position and size, display text etc.
There are options to exclude self process ID and stay on the top of all the other window. For carrying out the actions, we have to click on the Start button in the auWin window.
If you have tons of windows open on your PC then auWin tool can be useful in batch processing them all at once. Suppose, there are many Notepad windows open, you can close them all in a second using this tool. Another very good use of this tool is to make the invisible (hidden) windows visible and move them into the center of the desktop screen.
You can download auWin from https://github.com/dodaucy/auWin.