The macosxhints Rating:
[Score: 9 out of 10]
- Developer: Vincent Cuissard / Product page **
- Price: Free / open source
GeekBind is a handy little utility that offers some interesting window manipulation features, all accessible via global hotkeys. You can, for instance, press and hold a hotkey to make the current window invisible. Or increase or decrease its transparency in small steps. Or move windows (or the cursor). Or resize windows. All via hotkeys. Here's a picture of the full feature set:

As you can see, I don't use all the options...but there is one feature there that I've quickly found to be indispensible -- Move window. While you hold down the defined hot key, the window under the mouse is filled with a color (user controllable for color and transparency level), and an overlay showing the name of the app. Now just move the mouse, and the window moves! No more moving to the drag edge; just press and hold the hotkey, then move the mouse. I've set a mostly-transparent light color overlay, so I can still see the contents of the window I'm dragging around. It will even move background windows without activating them, automatically.
To make it even easier to use this window dragging feature, I reassigned a mouse button to activate the defined hotkey. So now I can move any window just by pressing and holding a mouse button, then moving the mouse. I love this -- no more looking for the right spot, and since I'm moving the mouse to move the window anyway, having a button activate the feature is perfect!
GeekBind runs as a faceless background application; a small "G" icon lives in your menubar, through which you activate and define the hotkeys, and quit the program. The program is PowerPC code, and though it would load on my Intel Core Duo mini, none of the features seemed to work. It was last updated in the middle of 2005, so I'm not sure what the odds are for an Intel version. I downloaded the source and tried a compile on the Intel box, but it failed ... perhaps someone with talent can get it working.
Thanks to macosxhints' reader blafusel for sending me the pointer to GeekBind.

