Efficient workflow with Divvy

Resizing windows — the magical way

I’m always trying productivity tools. Some of them improve the productivity, like Divvy, and some not. Others are even used to measure the productivity itself, like RescueTime, but we can talk about that in another post.

What is Divvy

Divvy is a small utility to resize windows. You may ask the following question: Does this kind of utilities really improve our productivity in a noticeable way? It depends on the task at hand, but the answer will probably be a yes.

In Web Development, is common to have plenty of windows opened and to use keyboard shortcuts to get things done faster. Here is where Divvy is useful. The bad thing here is that is available only on OS X.

The default behavior is to press CMD+ALT+KEY to show the resize dialog, but like the 90% of the time you will be probably resizing the windows in three ways:

• Full screen
• Half-screen-left
• Half-screen-right

The magic of shortcuts

Shortcuts will allow us to resize the windows using only the keyboard, maximizing the speed and without the need

My configuration is the following:

This is truly magical. You can set up a set of windows in 3 seconds. Pressing the shortcut twice, moves the window to the other display, making it possible to move windows between different screens really easy. Once you get used to navigate between desktops, windows and displays, it will be really frustrating to go back!

Bonus tip

While doing demos, sometimes there is a need to focus on specific points from the screen. I use a shortcut to zoom-in and zoom-out the window, making it really easy to play with the screen. This has become, like the Divvy shortcuts, an indispensable workflow trick.

In the preferences panel, go to Accessibility > Zoom and then enable Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom. Now you can press the key and zoom to specific points fast and easy. I use it with the CMD key, but that’s a personal preference, mainly because is use the ALT key to activate Alfred.