Snap Layouts and FancyZones: what they remember

Snap Layouts and Snap Groups

Built into Windows 11. Hover the maximize button or press Win + Z, pick one of the offered arrangements, and the window fills that region. Fill the remaining regions and Windows forms a Snap Group: hover any of those windows on the taskbar and the whole set comes back together.

What it remembers: the grouping of windows you snapped, for as long as those windows exist.
What it doesn’t: anything past their lifetime. Close a window and the group dissolves; restart and it is gone. Groups can’t be named or listed.

FancyZones

Part of Microsoft PowerToys, free and open source. You define your own zone layouts – any grid, any proportions – per monitor. Hold Shift while dragging a window and the zones appear; drop it in one and it fills it. Worth turning on in its settings:

• Move newly created windows to their last known zone. FancyZones keeps a per-application record of the zone an app was last dropped into and puts new windows of that app back there.
• Keep windows in their zones when the screen resolution changes.
• Override Windows Snap, so that Win + arrow moves windows between your zones.

What it remembers: your zone layouts, and which zone each application belongs in.
What it doesn’t: which particular windows were open. Its memory is per application, so three Explorer windows in three zones is not something it can express. It also never opens anything – every window it arranges must already exist.

Zones versus layouts

A zone tool answers where may windows go? It defines regions and helps you drop things into them quickly. The arrangement is something you perform, faster than by hand, but you perform it each time.

A layout tool answers what was on screen, and where? It records a specific set of windows in specific places and reproduces the situation on demand. If your day is “I want this window on the left two-thirds”, zones are the right answer. If it is “I want Monday morning back – the same six programs, the same screens, the same sizes”, zones will not get you there, because the thing you want restored was never recorded.

Side by side

They are not alternatives. These run together without conflict, and the combination is better than either alone: use zones to arrange a window exactly how you want it, then save that arrangement as a scene so you never have to arrange it again.

So which do you need?

• FancyZones is enough if you mostly work with the same few applications, one window each, and want to place them quickly on a screen that doesn’t change much.
• The built-in setting is enough if your layout is fine and the only thing that ruins it is a monitor sleeping or a dock coming off – that page is here.
• You want named layouts if you switch between distinct modes of work, keep several windows of the same app apart, or have to open the same programs before you can arrange them.

Where DeskScene comes in

Named layouts: scenes

DeskScene saves the windows you have open – position, size, monitor, maximized state – as a named scene, and restores the whole arrangement with a click, a global hotkey or automatically when your monitor setup changes. Windows are matched individually rather than by application, so several windows of the same program keep their own places.

Everything stays on your PC as plain JSON. No account, no telemetry.

Starting apps with arguments →

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