Why I built a 180 KB alternative to FancyZones + RegionToShare
I run a 49-inch super-ultrawide — a 5120×1440 panel that’s gloriously wide and slightly unmanageable. It’s really a triple-monitor setup pretending to be one screen, and Windows treats it as one screen. Fullscreen a video call and it swallows all 49 inches. Maximize a browser and it’s absurdly wide. So I did what everyone does: I stacked up tools.
The pile of tools
- PowerToys FancyZones for zone layouts and drag-to-snap.
- RegionToShare to share just one part of the screen in meetings.
- And I kept eyeing virtual-display drivers to fake extra monitors so fullscreen apps would stay boxed in.
Each does its one job well. But together they’re a lot: a big background bundle, a driver poking at the display stack, three different UIs, and still no single feature that keeps a fullscreen app confined to a region the way a real second monitor would.
What I actually wanted
One tool that:
- Splits the monitor into zones that act like separate monitors.
- Keeps fullscreen and maximized apps inside their zone — not just tiled windows.
- Lets me share a single zone into Zoom or Teams, live, with whatever’s underneath it.
- Is small and native enough that I forget it’s running.
That’s VirtualZones. It’s a single ~180 KB exe with zero dependencies — no .NET runtime, no driver, no admin, no install. It hooks window events, detects when the foreground window takes over the screen, and places it flush into the zone it belongs to. The share feature exposes one zone as its own window so meeting apps’ native picker can grab exactly that region.
The honest trade-off
Going driver-free means a couple of rough edges: Chromium’s F11 fullscreen re-asserts full-monitor bounds and can’t be held (maximize the browser instead), and there’s a one-frame flash when an app goes fullscreen before it snaps in. I’d rather ship those caveats than ask you to install a display driver.
If you’ve been juggling the same pile of tools, give it a try — it’s free for 7 days.