How To Use Fences With Many Open Windows

from Stardock Forums

I received a license for fences recently as a gift.  I've installed it and all looks good except for one thing I don't understand. 

How do you access items within a fence when you have 10 or so open windows? 

I must be missing something because the only way I can do it is to close, minimize, or move all windows sitting on top of the fence.  This trades the problem of clutter for the problem of access.  All the training videos show fences being used on a pristine desktop with no other open windows.  If I routinely have a lot of open windows, how do I access items within a fence that is always at the bottom of the stack?

 

fences
9,434 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

Hello,
Sorry to hear you are having issues. But, that is the way you work with desktop icons. You need to move all those Windows to see your desktop and click on those icons on your desktop. Fences is just the same, it just Fenced it up into boxes for you to organize those icons into group.

Thanks
Basj,
Stardock Community Assistant.

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top

If there was an option to unroll a fence *and* bring that fence to the foreground when you click on it's rolled up title bar and keep it in the foreground while the mouse pointer was within the boundaries of the unrolled fence, you would have the best of both worlds.   i.e. have the fence work like the Windows 7 task bar that appears when you point the mouse to it and disappears when you're done.  Given the choice of the two models, I'll keep my most frequently used icons on the Windows task bar and take the hit of using the start menu for the not so frequent rather than scattering my work windows every time I need to hit an icon.

My workaround for this (in my mind) issue is to take advantage of the pager app that I use (VirtuaWin) and dedicate one page for fences so I can switch to that page, go directly to the fence I want, launch the icon then manually move the resulting window back to the page where I need it.  Somewhat clumsy but better than interrupting the working page.

It seems like bringing the fence to the foreground would be relatively easy to do from a coding perspective and, if it's made to be an option, those that want to use that model can do it and those that don't can stay with the default.

Just my $0.02.

 

 

 

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Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top

Well, it has been asked lots of time by others for this feature but there are lots of explanation on why that is not possible you can review some of it here : https://forums.stardock.com/492327 By Paul (Jafo) Reply #8,#30 etc etc.

Thank you,

Basj,
Stardock Community Assistant

 

Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top

Hey, in case you're still struggling with this, check the options. In the "hotkeys" section, it shows you how to access the fences without having to close windows. The win+space option is especially cool, because it overlays your fences over whatever windows you have open (transparency doesn't quite work the same as on the desktop though, so you might have to adjust that).