Ever have a lot of windows open at one time? Ever want to lay them all out nicely without having to do a lot of manual dragging and resizing? Then you should take a look at a small utility called GridMove.

On my system, I can press Windows+G at any time and resize and place the current window in the top left corner, or fill the entire right half the screen (or a number of other configurations), or force it to be on top of all other windows by pressing 1-9. You can choose from a number of “templates” (mappings of buttons to screen locations) or create your own.

I find this utility to be helpful when programming (cycling through tutorials, code, output, etc) and grading programs for my TA position, where I have literally seven active windows up at a time.

Gridmove can be found here: http://jgpaiva.dcmembers.com/gridmove.html

A recent project I’ve been working on was built with Ruby on Rails. Anyone who has had the experience of starting to learn RoR by working on another person’s already built project may agree with me – finding how things are generated is difficult. When I wanted to change text or learn where the design was stored, I had a rough time. Then I discovered Windows Grep.

Windows Grep allows users to do in depth file searches. The user can define a string to search (or a regular expression) and specify a directory and file types and the program searches within the file’s contents.

In case you were not aware, Grep comes from a unix command and is an ancronym for Global Regular Expression Print. There are variations of this tool for windows, but I am drawn to Windows Grep because of its GUI layout and informative search results.

I used this tool by looking at a web page on rails, viewing it’s source, copying a small string of text that I thought would be unique, and pasting it into Windows Grep to find results. It certainly helped with the beginning stages of learning my way around the project.

Windows Grep can be found here: http://www.wingrep.com/