Dexpot

Achieving the best virtual desktop experience with Dexpot

Out of the box, Dexpot is a great package, but you will definitely want to look
into the Settings menu and change some things to make it better and more persona
lized. Here s how to achieve the best virtual desktop setup with Dexpot:
1. Step After installing the program, it should automatically start
if not, star
t it manually using the icon on the desktop or in the Start Menu. Then, right cl
ick on the program icon in the system tray in the lower right corner and click o
n Settings to enter the settings menu:
2. Step You ll see plenty of options here. The General tab lets you choose the num
ber of virtual desktops you ll have
use only as many as you need, as they use more
RAM as you go higher.
You can hide the splash screen at startup, create and load profiles, set autosta
rt options and more. The one thing I recommend changing is the process priority
setting it to High or Realtime will make the virtual desktops more responsive and ge
nerally faster, especially under heavy load.
3. Step The Appearance menu lets you set the appearance of the system tray icon
and configure the system menus.
You can personalize this to your needs, with the only thing I recommend leaving
checked being the Add Dexpot entries to the system menus of all windows , which add
s Dexpot menus when you right click on a window s title bar, and Hide Dexpot compon
ents when a full-screen application is active , which makes Dexpot invisible and m
ostly inactive when you play a game, watch a movie or use any other full screen
program.
4. Step The Components menu lets you configure options for the main Dexpot compo
nents, which are Desktop Manager, Desktop Preview, DexTab, Full screen desktops
preview and Window Catalog. I suggest you leave these at their default settings
as they are very well configured already, but you can of course customize them t
o your needs.
5. Step As the name implies, the Controls menu lets you customize the controls a
nd hotkeys to be used with Dexpot. I recommend you set your own hotkeys, as the
default Dexpot ones are pretty hard and unintuitive
there s plenty of controls to
be set, and sometimes the hotkeys may overlap, so you can just completely disabl
e the hotkeys for the features you don t use
6. Step The Switching Desktops settings lets you choose the monitors that will b
e active for Dexpot you can have 4 virtual desktops spread across two monitors,
or a dedicated desktop on the 1st monitor and 4 switchable virtual desktops on t
he 2nd monitor, which is very convenient.
It also lets you set Desktop Names for a more intuitive navigation, set options
for the desktop icons and customize each virtual desktop s resolution and screensa
ver.
7. Step Last but not the least, the Plugins and Extras menu lets you select a fe
w optional plugins to activate, of which I can only recommend DexCube if you wan
t to make the virtual desktop transitions prettier, but overall the plugins cons
ume more resources, make the system slower and worse, are prone to crashing, so
I suggest you leave them disabled. The one setting that is very important here i
s named When activating a window on another desktop .
My opinion is that it s best to set it to Nothing
this makes the virtual desktops an
d their windows pretty much completely separated, while the default setting copi

es a window from a background desktop to your current one if it has a notificati

on or is just activated by some process. That is very annoying
but if you really
need to see these windows right away, you can set the option to Switch to the re
spective desktop .