The macosxhints Rating:
[Score: 10 out of 10]
- Developer: Digital Cow Software/ Product page
- Price: Free
Wraparound is a little app that removes your screens' hard edges. When it's running, the leftmost edge of your leftmost display is no longer a "wall." Instead, when you cross the leftmost edge of the screen, your cursor will jump to the rightmost edge of your rightmost display. In my case, I've got a 23" LCD as my main display, and a 19" Sony to its right. On the Sony, I keep most of my 'ancillary' windows -- iChat, stocks, iCal -- while I use the main screen for the apps I actively work in.
Without Wraparound, if I'm on the Sony screen and need to get to something near the left edge of the 23" display, it's a really long trip with the mouse (menus excluded -- I use DejaMenu for menu activation via the mouse). With Wraparound installed, I just flick my mouse right instead of left, though, and I'm instantly at the left edge of the main screen. This requires moving my eyes left while my hand moves right, but I really didn't find it hard to adjust to that at all, but your mileage may vary. You can even drag windows across screen boundaries, moving them across many inches of screen real estate with the smallest of mouse movements.
Depending on how many monitors you have and how they're laid out, you specify which screen edges you'd like Wraparound to ignore -- up, down, left, and right. In my case, I have it set to ignore left and right edges, but enforce the top and bottom edges. So you ask, "What about Fitt's Law?" I'm glad you asked. Wraparound's preferences includes an "auto-disable" feature with a definable pixel range. With this option enabled, the pixel area you specify will act as a hard wall in the corners of the screen. You can then fling your mouse to the top left corner of the screen and have it slam into the Apple menu and stop.
You can also specify that you want Wraparound to work in all applications, only listed applications, or all except the listed applications. Finally, there are modifier keys you can set to wrap all edges or wrap no edges. So if I Shift-drag the mouse, I can move out of the top or bottom of the screen, and if I Command-drag the mouse, then all edges become solid again.
As I stated up front, you'll probably either love this app or hate it -- but it's free to try, so if you've got a couple monitors and are tired of long-haul mouse movements, give it a shot. In my testing, it uses a trivial amount of CPU power (though there's a slider that let you vary that to suit your needs), and it's a simple application: if you don't like it, just delete it and it's gone. It's staying on my machine, however!

