How to move windows between virtual desktops without Task View on Windows 10

Virtual desktops on Windows 10 haven’t changed much over the years. They are more or less in the same shape they were in when originally introduced. This is despite the fact there’s potential for the feature to be truly useful. It’s now just even with virtual desktops on macOS. You can move any app or a single app window from one desktop to the other but you have to go through task view to do it. If you want to move windows between virtual desktops without Task View, you can install a super lightweight File Explorer extension called MovetoDesktop.

VirusTotal scan

Before we proceed, we have to warn you that this app was flagged by six anti-virus apps/services when scanned on VirusTotal. That said, it has a positive leaning rating from the community. Tests showed that it is not malicious in any way. Some of its ‘maliciousness’ may be attributed to the app not having much of a UI. With this in mind, try this app at your own risk. It is open source so if you understand code, you can take a look at what’s going on under the hood.

Move windows between virtual desktops

Download  and run MovetoDesktop. You won’t see any indication that the app is running. As mentioned in the previous section, it has no UI of its own. Make sure you have at least one virtual desktop.

Open any app of your choice, right-click its title bar and you will see a ‘Move to’ option in the context menu. Select the desktop you want to move the window to.

The window will be moved to the desktop you selected and you won’t have to go through task view at all. This works on both desktop apps like File Explorer, Control Panel, and VLC player, and also on UWP apps like Netflix, Skype, and Slack.

Since MovetoDesktop has no UI, you might want to know how you can quit the app. There’s not even a system tray icon that you can access. To quit the app, open the Task Manager and look for MovetoDesktop on the Processes tab. If you’re having trouble finding it, tap the M key repeatedly to scroll through all processes that begin with the letter ‘M’. When you find MovetoDesktop, click the End Task button at the bottom.

If you accidentally ran the app’s EXE more than once, you will have to quit it just as many times. For each time the app was run, there will be a separate process for it in Task Manager. To check if it has been closed, right-click the title bar of any window and the Move to option should no longer appear there.

Want to the current window to a different virtual desktop with a hotkey instead? Give zVirtualDesktop a try.