Increase width of drag handles W10

Question

Is there a way to increase the width of drag-handles in Win 10 ?

It always takes me aout five attempts to activate the cursor/handle so I can drag the edges of windows to resize them. The divider between the search window and address bar is even worse. Resizing column widths (in "details" view) is pretty painful, too.

I have a high DPI 13" laptop and you have to be within a nanometer of the window edge to get the handle up. It was the same in Win 8.

thanks

Answer 1

Search in your registry for the value

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics

double click on BorderWidth and increase the negative value, which usually is something like -13. You'll might have to test some settings, but a value between -100and -200 should do the job. Maybe even less, according to your preferences.

You might have to restart for the change to be effective.

Answer adapted from this article

Answer 2

There are various solutions to this problem.

Using a larger mouse cursor might help a bit, in Control Panel > Mouse > Pointers.

Changing the border widths could help, but has its gotchas. You may read about it in the post How to change border width in MS Windows to grab and resize it?

I would counsel rather to use third-party products, some are listed below. They allow one to move and resize windows, even ones that have no borders or title.

X-Window Manager like dragging and resizing of windows

This old program still works flawlessly. It uses the Alt key like this:

• Alt+Right-click dragging resizes the clicked window
• Alt+Left-click dragging moves the clicked window

Window Manipulator

Similar, but uses Alt+R which is somewhat more awkward to use.