How to rearrange virtual desktops on Windows 10

Virtual Desktops on Windows 10 have been almost stagnant since the feature was first introduced. A few small changes were made to it e.g., you can pin an app to a virtual desktop but not much else has changed or improved. You may or may not be surprised to learn that virtual desktops cannot be rearranged. You can move windows to any virtual desktop of your choice but you cannot change their order out of the box. SylphyHornEx is an app that fixes that.

SylphyHornEx has a lot of great features that improve the stock Virtual Desktops feature on Windows 10. It displays the desktop number in the system tray, it shows an alert on the screen when you switch to a different desktop telling you which one you’ve switched to, and it allows you to change the stock keyboard shortcuts that control Virtual Desktops. It is free, and open source. Download it from Github.

Rearrange virtual desktops

Run SylphyHornEx. It doesn’t need to be installed and the rearrange feature is activated by default. You will need to familiarize yourself with the keyboard shortcuts for it though. The Left Win + Left Alt + Left Arrow key moves the current desktop to the left. This means that if you’re on virtual desktop number two, and you tap this shortcut, it will turn virtual desktop two into virtual desktop one.

The Left Win + Left Alt + Right Arrow key will move the current virtual desktop to the right. If you’re on virtual desktop two and you tap this shortcut, it will turn virtual desktop two into virtual desktop three.

Each time you tap the shortcut to move a virtual desktop, you will see an on-screen alert telling you which desktop you’re on. You can customize this shortcut from the app’s settings.

There are a lot of little utilities for making virtual desktops more useful and SylphyHornEx supports some of the features they carry so you can opt-out of using other tools in favor of this one. Its wallpaper controls aren’t very good though. They tend to ‘fit’ the wallpaper and there’s no option to change it to ‘fill’ or ‘center’.

It’s flawless otherwise and it’s in active development. This is, in fact, a brand new feature that was added in a recent update so perhaps the wallpaper problem will be fixed over time. The current methods for setting a different wallpaper for each virtual desktop are a bit complicated and having a simpler way to do it would be better.

Read Full Bio

Fatima Wahab

Fatima has been writing for AddictiveTips for six years. She began as a junior writer and has been working as the Editor in Chief since 2014. Fatima gets an adrenaline rush from figuring out how technology works, and how to manipulate it. A well-designed app, something that solves a common everyday problem and looks

Latest from Author

How to Take a Screenshot on Windows Best FPS Counter Software for Windows