Why am I blocked from dragging windows across screen boundaries (multiple monitors) in Windows 10?

Recently upgraded to Windows 10. When I attempt to grab the title bar of a window and drag it to another monitor - I have two side-by-side monitors - Windows frequently prevents it. It appears like Windows thinks that I want to "snap" the window to the side of the origin monitor and won't let my mouse cursor cross the boundary to the destination monitor.

It appears like this:

Figure 1: Google Chrome is being dragged left across Screen 2 onto Screen 1. When the mouse pointer hits the edge of the screens, a blue circle appears, showing the "snap to screen" effect.

2

6 Answers

It is a question of speed of your cursor.

If you move a window slowly towards (or do a brief stop close to) the edge between your two screens, your chances that Windows will think that you want to snap that window are high. Then it will block your cursor "to help you".

If you move your window more quickly you won't have this behaviour and you'll barely notice the small circle that is displayed when snapping.

If you move really fast, Windows won't even display that circle.

Thus, avoid stopping close to that edge or increase your cursor speed. Hope it helps.

10

The block is caused by the Windows 10 Aero Snap feature. It if you drag a window slowly, it will think you want to snap to the side/top border. You have 3 options that i know of:

1. disable snapping in Display Settings / Multi-tasking. This disables ALL snapping, including the Windows 7 style snap-to-top-of-screen which you are probably use to. I tried this but I miss snapping to the top of the screen too much.

2. move the mouse fast. This is your main option that actually works but is as annoying as hell, coz you'll often have to try again a couple of times when you forget to move the mouse fast.

3. don't drag. use the WINDOWS ARROW key combination to snap windows around, or WINDOWS SHIFT ARROW to move between monitors. Some people seem to like this. I find this as annoying as acid on my face.

The fourth option is to whine to Microsoft about it until they give us an option to turn off snap-to-edges that are inside the extended desktop area.

Also worth mentioning, and even more annoying is there is a few pixels at the top of the screen that you can't drag through even if you move the mouse fast.

How to disable sticky corners in Windows 10

There seems to be a third party app/hack on that page to get around that problem, but no official solution from Microsoft yet...

5

This is due to the "Snap" feature, if you don't like it you can simply turn it off.

1. Right Click on Desktop
2. Select Display Settings
3. Go to Multi-tasking
4. Turn off the Snap Windows toggle switch

No more snapping.

As @Mik has said, it is all about the speed of your cursor when dragging the window.

The reason you are being "blocked" is because Windows now has "Aero Snap" which, allows any [native] window to be snapped to an edge of the screen. The Aero Snap feature cannot work properly if there is no blocking.

So to circumvent this problem, Microsoft decided that it would be best to block the blocking only if the cursor was exceeding a certain "speed".

Solution: Drag windows quickly.

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Also, could you please clarify something for me. In your screenshot, to the left of it, there is an open window which appears to be snapped. That window is on your left monitor right? Is it snapped to the right side of your left monitor? If so, and if you are not dragging the window very slowly, this might actually be a bug.

I am using Actual Windows Manager with Windows 10 and it has settings to replace the standard Windows 10 snapping with your own custom windows snapping features. After enabling AWMs snapping features this is not an issue any more and my UI elements only snap how an where I want them to.

Note: Taken from my own question/answer here

From a post by Matt Breedlove, the setting "DockTargetMouseWidth" removes the Monitor border stickiness.

It can be added via command line, as show belown, or via registry edit program (win+r: regedit)

reg add "HKCU\Control Panel\Mouse" /v DockTargetMouseWidth /t REG_DWORD /d 0

With this registry entry set, the border of monitors no longer stick and the shortcut win+arrow_key continues to work for shortkey window snapping. It would be great if Microsoft added an option to disable this feature, as they've done for snap settings.

Multitasking Snap Menu