AppMover

Move windows between monitors in one click, right from the system tray.

AppMover sits quietly in the system tray and lists your open windows. Pick one, pick a monitor from the submenu, and it's moved there — centered in the usable work area (taskbar excluded), with its maximized/restored state preserved. No dragging across screens, no admin rights, no bloat.

Contents

• Features
• Download
• Configuration
• Building from source
• Project layout
• Testing
• Logging
• License

Features

⌨️ Global hotkeys	Win+Shift+Right / Win+Shift+Left move the focused window to the next/previous monitor without opening the tray menu. Configurable — see Configuration.
🧠 "Last used monitor" memory	The submenu entry an app was last moved to is shown checked, per app (matched by executable name), so you can see at a glance where something usually goes. Purely informational — AppMover never moves a window on its own.
🚀 Start with Windows	A checkbox in the tray menu toggles autostart via the per-user registry Run key. No admin rights needed.
👻 Cloaked/UWP filtering	Windows DWM has hidden from the screen (common for suspended/background UWP frame windows on Windows 10/11) are not listed, even though Win32 still reports them as WS_VISIBLE.
🖥️ Virtual desktop awareness	Windows that aren't on the currently active virtual desktop are filtered out, via the public IVirtualDesktopManager COM interface.
🔍 Per-monitor DPI awareness	AppMover declares Per-Monitor-V2 DPI awareness, so positions/sizes are computed in real physical pixels on mixed-DPI multi-monitor setups, with a size-scaling fallback for windows that aren't DPI-aware themselves.
⚡ Event-driven refresh	The window list updates via SetWinEventHook/WM_DISPLAYCHANGE rather than blind polling; a much longer poll (configurable, default 10s) remains only as a safety net.
🔔 Update check	At startup and every 24h, AppMover checks GitHub Releases for a newer version; if one exists, a "Update available: vX.Y.Z" entry appears in the tray menu and opens the release page when clicked. Only runs against tagged builds (see Configuration to disable it).

Download

Grab the latest release from the Releases page:

• AppMover-Setup.exe (recommended) — an Inno Setup installer that installs per-user to %LocalAppData%\Programs\AppMover — no admin rights, no UAC prompt — with a Start Menu entry, an optional desktop shortcut, and a proper uninstaller. It deliberately doesn't offer its own "start with Windows" option: use the one already in AppMover's tray menu instead, so there's only one place that toggles autostart.
• AppMover-portable.exe — the plain binary, run from anywhere, nothing installed.

Every v* tag produces both artifacts automatically (.github/workflows/release.yml).

Requirements

• Windows (the app uses the Win32 API directly and only builds with GOOS=windows)
• Go 1.27+ to build from source

Building from source

The project has no cgo dependencies, so it cross-compiles cleanly from any platform, e.g. from macOS or Linux:

./build.sh   # or: GOOS=windows GOARCH=amd64 go build -o dist/appmover.exe ./cmd/appmover

Run dist/appmover.exe on a Windows machine (or VM) to test it — a native macOS or Linux binary cannot execute a Windows PE binary.

To build and run on Windows directly:

go build -o appmover.exe ./cmd/appmover
.\appmover.exe

Building the installer

AppMover-Setup.exe is built with Inno Setup (installer/appmover.iss). To build it locally you need Windows and Inno Setup's ISCC.exe — it's not something that can be produced by cross-compiling from macOS/Linux:

go build -ldflags="-H=windowsgui" -o dist\appmover.exe .\cmd\appmover
iscc installer\appmover.iss

Note

We looked at Velopack (a newer installer/auto-update framework) as an alternative, but its vpk CLI requires the full .NET SDK regardless of the target app's language — a disproportionate toolchain addition for a project that otherwise builds with nothing but go build. Inno Setup is a single small compiler binary, has no runtime dependency, and is the long-established standard for this kind of small Windows utility.

Configuration

On first run AppMover creates a config file at %AppData%\AppMover\config.json with these defaults:

{
  "refreshIntervalMs": 10000,
  "moveNextMonitorHotkey": "win+shift+right",
  "movePrevMonitorHotkey": "win+shift+left",
  "maxWindowSlots": 20,
  "excludedProcessNames": [],
  "excludedTitles": [],
  "disableUpdateCheck": false
}

Key	Description
refreshIntervalMs	The safety-net poll interval; the menu also refreshes immediately on real window/display changes regardless of this value.
moveNextMonitorHotkey / movePrevMonitorHotkey	modifier+...+key, where modifiers are any of win/ctrl/alt/shift and the key is an arrow (left/right/up/down) or a single letter/digit.
maxWindowSlots	How many window entries the tray menu pre-allocates; beyond that, a trailing "+N more windows not shown" entry appears instead of silently truncating the list.
excludedProcessNames / excludedTitles	Case-insensitive substring filters, e.g. "excludedProcessNames": ["chrome.exe"].
disableUpdateCheck	Set to true to stop AppMover from calling the GitHub releases API to check for updates (see Update check).

Edit the file and restart AppMover to apply changes. Per-app "last used monitor" memory is stored separately at %AppData%\AppMover\state.json.

Project layout

• cmd/appmover — application entry point; sets process DPI awareness. rsrc_windows_amd64.syso (generated, checked in) embeds icon.ico as the exe's own Windows resource, so the file icon shown by Explorer, the taskbar, shortcuts, and the installer/uninstaller entry all match the tray icon. Regenerate it after changing the icon with: go run github.com/tc-hib/go-winres@latest simply --icon internal/tray/icon.ico --arch amd64 --manifest none --file-description "AppMover" --product-name "AppMover" --out cmd/appmover/rsrc
• internal/tray — system tray icon, menu, refresh, and wiring for hotkeys/autostart/state
• internal/win32 — thin wrappers around the Win32 APIs (window/monitor enumeration, positioning, DPI, cloaking) built on github.com/gonutz/w32/v2
• internal/winlist — filters raw window handles down to real, user-visible application windows
• internal/movewindow — the move/resize logic that places a window on a target monitor
• internal/layout — pure geometry math (centering/DPI scaling), no Win32 dependency, builds and tests on any platform
• internal/msgloop — a dedicated hidden window + Win32 message loop (separate from systray's own, which is private to that library) for global hotkeys, WM_DISPLAYCHANGE, and SetWinEventHook-driven refresh
• internal/vdesktop — hand-written COM wrapper around IVirtualDesktopManager for virtual-desktop filtering
• internal/autostart — toggles the per-user Run registry key
• internal/config, internal/state, internal/applog — JSON settings/memory persistence and the rotating debug log, pure Go, no Win32 dependency
• internal/update, internal/version — checks GitHub Releases for a newer version; version.Version is set at build time via -ldflags -X (see .github/workflows/release.yml) and stays "dev" otherwise, which disables the check
• installer/appmover.iss — Inno Setup script for AppMover-Setup.exe (see Download)

Testing

Packages with no Win32 dependency (internal/layout, internal/config, internal/state, internal/applog, internal/update) have real unit tests that run on any platform:

go test ./internal/layout/... ./internal/config/... ./internal/state/... ./internal/applog/... ./internal/update/...

Everything else is Windows-only by nature (raw syscalls, COM, a native message loop) and can only be verified by compiling for the target and exercising it on real Windows:

GOOS=windows GOARCH=amd64 go vet ./...
GOOS=windows GOARCH=amd64 go build ./...

CI (.github/workflows/ci.yml) runs both of the above on every push/PR; .github/workflows/release.yml builds and publishes appmover.exe on v* tags.

Logging

At runtime AppMover writes a debug log to %LocalAppData%\AppMover\logs\appmover.log, rotating it (one .log.old backup) once it passes 5MB. This deliberately isn't next to the executable: AppMover builds with -H=windowsgui (no console, so stderr would be invisible anyway), and the install directory may not be writable by a regular user once properly installed. If even that location can't be opened, it falls back to %Temp%\AppMover\appmover.log.

License

GPL-3.0 — see LICENSE.

This project depends on:

• fyne.io/systray — Apache-2.0
• github.com/gonutz/w32/v2 — MIT
• github.com/godbus/dbus/v5, golang.org/x/sys — BSD-3-Clause

All of these are permissive licenses compatible with distribution under GPL-3.0.