Border sections

Border resistance used to be one number per screen edge, applied to every crossing. That made it a blunt instrument: the only way to stop a window escaping to the next screen while you dragged it was to make the cursor sticky the rest of the time too.

An edge is now made of sections you draw yourself, and each section carries two settings: how hard it resists a plain move, and how hard it resists a drag — a move with any mouse button held. Either can be turned into an outright block.

Drawing a section

Open the Border resistance view. A band appears along each of the four edges of every screen in the layout.

• Drag on an empty part of a band to draw a section.
• Drag one of its ends to resize it, its middle to move it.
• Click it to open its settings.
• Delete removes the selected section.

Double click does the obvious thing in both cases: on a section it grows until it meets its neighbours, on empty space it draws one over the whole free stretch.

While you drag, boundaries snap to the useful places: the edges of the neighbouring screens, the corners of this one, its middle, and any section already drawn on an edge running the same way — across the gap, on the opposite side of this same screen, or on a screen further along. Snapping onto a neighbour’s edge matters more than it looks: those are exactly the points where the crossing target changes, so a section that lines up with one leaves no one-millimetre sliver behind. Hold Ctrl while dragging to place a boundary freely.

What the colours mean

What you can build with it

A passage in the middle of a border. Block the top and bottom of an edge and leave a gap: the cursor only crosses where you decided. Useful when a taskbar button or a window’s close button sits right against the edge and you keep overshooting onto the next screen.

A barrier a window can still cross. Block plain moves, leave drags free. The cursor stops at the edge while you work, but dragging a window across still works. This is the amber setting, and it is what a freshly drawn section starts as.

The opposite. Block drags, leave moves free, and a window can no longer escape to the screen next door while the cursor roams freely.

A catch in a corner. A short blocking section at the end of a shared edge stops the cursor there, so corner targets stay easy to hit.

One-way borders

A crossing is defined per source edge. Blocking the right edge of screen A says nothing about the left edge of screen B — so blocking one and leaving the other open gives you a border the cursor crosses in one direction only.

That also means a symmetric passage has to exist on both sides. The Mirror button copies the selected section onto the facing edge of the screen across it, at the same physical position; it takes whatever part of that edge is still free, and greys out when there is nothing across the edge to mirror onto.

Seeing it on the real screens

The map is drawn at whatever zoom the window happens to be at, which cannot answer the question that matters: does this passage actually line up with that taskbar button?

The Show on screens button puts the same bands on your real monitors, at their true size and position — and they are editable there too, exactly like on the map. It is the border-resistance equivalent of the rulers in the layout view.

Getting out of a wall

Ctrl forces a crossing regardless of any resistance or block. It is the escape hatch if you seal an edge by accident.

One exception worth knowing: on Wayland, modifier keys are not observable without capturing the keyboard, so the Ctrl bypass does not work there. A fully blocked edge really is sealed under Wayland, and the editor warns you when you create one.