It’s been awhile since I’ve come across a small tool for Windows that solves an irritating problem in an effective and transparent way. In fact I rarely even think about Windows software anymore, unless I’m playing a game. So much of what I do these days is done in linux or out in the cloud (in linux) that I’ve pretty much degraded my Windows expertise from superuser down to somewhere above n00b. So when I recently built a new computer and finally upgraded to Windows 10 from 7 Pro I ran into something highly irritating that I had no idea how to solve.
The issue was that I replaced my aging and amazingly long-lived Dell 2405FPW monitor with a new Dell 4k P2715Q. Placed alongside my other Dell, a 24″ U2412m, it makes for a nice, big workspace, with my main work on the screen in front of me, and lots of other stuff parked on the smaller screen to the left. The problem was mouse movement between the two. The P2715Q is running at 3840 x 2160, and the U2412M is at 1920 x 1200. Windows handles scaling content for the displays quite nicely, but with the 24″ display logically placed in the center of the 27″ display’s left edge, anytime you tried to move the mouse across the top or bottom of the larger screen and over to the smaller you’d run into a wall, and have to move the pointer vertically to find the hidden opening in the fence. Meh.
A little googling and I came across this gem:
https://github.com/mgth/LittleBigMouse
LittleBigMouse is a lightweight windows service (14MB and negligible CPU) that handles adjusting the mouse position when you move between monitors with different resolutions. It’s small, it installs quickly, and it just works. It is still described as an alpha application by its author, so YMMV, but it has worked flawlessly for me. One thing I haven’t tried yet is gaming with it running. If I have any issues I’ll post an update, but since the app can be easily toggled on and off I don’t think that will be an issue regardless. Props to the author. You can download it at:
Hi,
If you like LittleBigMouse you could like my tool too.
It does the same but is smaller 477kB and Task Manager shows 0% for CPU all the time.
It’s called MouseTrap:
https://github.com/r-Larch/MouseTrap/
This looks very interesting, Rene. I’ll give it a try. Thanks for the comment.