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Playing
The game opens. The call, the guide and a browser take their places on the other screen, the sound moves to the headphones, the pointer stops at the edge of the game.
Stillward Display
Stillward Display
A Windows utility for desks with more than one screen
Name a game. Your other monitor lays itself out, the sound moves to your headphones, the pointer stays where you are playing — and all of it is undone when you close it.
Coming to Steam — the store page opens for wishlists as soon as it is approved.
$24.99 · one purchase, no subscription · Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit
Name a program — a game, an editor, anything that takes a screen — and say what should happen around it. When it opens, that happens. When it closes, it is undone. Nothing you have not named is ever touched.
Zones you drew, filled by the programs you named. Zones are fractions of the monitor, so a preset made at 1440p still means the same thing at 4K.
Headphones while you play, speakers for the rest. The system default moves, so whatever is already playing goes with it — and it moves back.
Not just a program. A browser window opens on the address you gave the zone — several of them, on different pages, if that is what the session needs.
If the window a zone names is not running, it is started — and it goes to its zone when it is ready, not when it first appears. On out of the box, because a preset that quietly does nothing is worse than one that asks.
No more sliding onto the other screen mid-fight and clicking the desktop. Let go the moment you switch away.
The screens you are not playing on, if you want them dark. Hidden the moment the game stops being in front.
The sound, the windows, the pointer, the screens. Recorded before anything changes, and restored even if the program crashed.
A preset is triggered by a program and does not care which one. That is the whole of it — and it is why the same setting answers five different jobs without a line of it being written for any of them. Every film below is one unbroken take on one machine: the preset is built on camera, and then it runs. Keep scrolling; there is a desk for each of them.
The game opens. The call, the guide and a browser take their places on the other screen, the sound moves to the headphones, the pointer stops at the edge of the game.
The editor opens and the desk around it assembles itself: the chat in its corner, the music, a browser ready to go.
Two browser windows open and go to their own pages — one picked from the list, one an address typed in once and kept.
One zone naming an address, the other naming a program. The pack site opens itself; the music starts.
Your channel, your chat and your alerts — three windows of one browser, three pages, opened by the encoder starting. Then one press, and all three come alive at once.
Everything Steam has installed is listed before you do anything, read straight from the library's own files. Setting one up fills the trigger in for you, so nobody has to invent where to start.
Configuration is what people give up on in this kind of program, so there is as little of it as we could manage: your games are listed the second the window opens, and setting one up fills the trigger in for you.
A layout picked from templates, a program in each zone, the output the sound should go to, and what should happen for the length of the session. One pass, and it is set for good.
Five minutes from opening the program to a preset that runs itself.
A browser is the one program whose window is empty until somebody types an address into it. Putting the window back therefore left the last step to you — which is the step this exists to remove. So a zone holding a browser gets a second row: what it opens.
Pick a page from the list, or type your own address and keep it. Several windows of the same browser, each on a different page, each in its own zone — which is what a streaming desk is made of, and what no window manager will do for you.
And a site can be the trigger. Open your browser on the page you named, and the session sets itself up around it.
A desk is a named arrangement of your windows with a key of its own and a sound output of its own. Press the key: the windows go where you put them, and the sound goes with the state and stays there — because that is what you just asked for.
Work and Play, one key each. This half needs no second monitor.
A preset can carry a key too. Every other way a session begins is reactive — something opens, the desk arranges itself around it — and that is right for a game you were launching anyway. It is the wrong shape for the session you decide to start: press the key and the whole thing assembles, the trigger included.
Keep the pointer inside any fullscreen game without building a preset for it. Keep one window — a map, a guide — above the game by a key.
And put your desk back by a key without leaving the game: the windows squeezed by a lowered resolution go back to the arrangement you saved, at that resolution. That is the one thing Windows never does for you while the game still holds the screen.
Arrange your other monitor the same way three times after the same game, and it notices and offers to save that as a preset.
It only ever offers. Nothing is moved because of something the program worked out on its own — an observation is not permission, and there is no automatic mode here.
A monitor that supports 165 Hz running at 60. A desktop below the panel's own resolution. It happens after a driver update or a game that exited badly, nothing on screen says so, and people play like that for months.
One button fixes it. When there is nothing to report, it says that too.
This is the part of the category that gets products uninstalled, so it is stated plainly rather than left to be discovered.
The things worth knowing before you pay rather than after.
The ones worth answering before you pay rather than after.
It never reaches into another program. No DLL is loaded into a foreign process, nothing is hooked into the graphics pipeline, and the one system hook it uses is the out-of-context kind that cannot run code inside anybody else's program. That is a decision made at the start of the project and it has no exceptions — it is why the questions this category usually attracts do not apply.
No. It runs as you, and asks for nothing more. The cost of that is in the limitations above: Windows does not let a normal program move the windows of something running as administrator, so those are skipped and named in the report rather than quietly failing.
There is nothing drawn over your game and nothing running inside it. Between events the program is a thread waiting on a message queue; it wakes when a window changes, does its work in a few milliseconds, and goes back to sleep. One 1.4 MB executable, no service, no driver.
Partly, and it is worth being exact. Zones need a second screen — a preset arranges the monitor you are not playing on. Desks, the keys and the sound output do work on one screen: two named arrangements of your windows, a key each, and a different output for each. If that is not enough, do not buy it for the zones.
Whichever ones Windows says are browsers — the same list the Default Apps
page reads, plus whatever holds your https association. There
is no list of names inside the program, so a browser you install tomorrow
works without an update. Asking one for a second window rather
than a second tab has no standard, so the program tries the conventions in
order, watches for the window, and remembers which one worked.
No, and the way it works is worth stating exactly. What is matched is the window title — the text in the taskbar, which every program on your machine can already see. The address bar is never read. There is no way to read one from outside a browser that does not switch that browser's accessibility layer on for the rest of the session, and that cost would land on your machine rather than ours. The trade is that a page about a site can match it too; the window says that is what it does rather than implying it knows where you are.
No. It reads your installed games from the library files on disk, so the list is there with Steam closed. Presets triggered by ordinary programs do not involve Steam at all, and nothing here talks to it while you play.
Never without being asked. It does not appear as “currently playing” and does not add to any game's hours. Counting a session towards your own Steam hours is a setting, and it is off out of the box. A default you have to switch off is the thing worth protecting.
Everything it is about to change is written to disk first — the display mode, the window styles, the sound device, the windows it raised. On the next start it finds that record and puts it all back, and tells you it did. The state a crash leaves you in is the thing worth getting right, and it is tested by crashing it.
Steam's own refund terms apply and we do not argue with them: under two hours of use and within fourteen days of buying, you can ask for your money back from Steam directly, no reason needed. Two hours is more than enough to find out — one preset takes five minutes.
About five minutes for the first preset, and nothing after that. Your installed games are already listed when the window opens and the trigger is filled in for you; the rest is one dialog. If you would rather not, arrange your other monitor the same way three times and the program will offer to write the preset for you.
One purchase, and the machine sets itself up for what you are about to do — every time, without being asked twice.
Coming to Steam — the store page opens for wishlists as soon as it is approved.
$24.99 · no subscription, no account, no telemetry · Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit