Here’s a Chromebook window resize trick you likely didn’t know about

There are tons of little navigation tricks littered throughout Chrome, and that means it is very easy to miss smaller tips and tricks that get added along the way. This one showed up for us this morning as we were doing some initial hands-on testing of the new Lenovo Chromebooks announced at MWC 2022. No, we’re not in attendance, but Lenovo was kind enough to send over some samples that arrived early this morning and we’ll have some thoughts out about these new Chromebooks very, very soon.

As I was clicking around the new Lenovo Chromebook Duet 3, I inadvertently double-clicked a window that was fully opened. As you likely know, this minimized it to its last, non-full-screen state. I went to re-maximize things and missed the target just a bit, and what I ended up with was a new double-click shortcut that I didn’t know existed.

Double-click the expand arrows

When you hover the edges of an open window in Chrome OS, you see a double-arrow icon appear that indicates you can drag the window in that axis to resize things a bit. On the top, it is a vertical resize, and on the sides it is a horizontal resize. You’ve likely used this window functionality quite a bit in the past. What I didn’t realize until today, however, is what happens when you double click with this icon present.

As would make sense, the window expands only on that axis to the full width or height of the screen. So, if you have the left/right arrows visible on the side of your window, you can double-click to expand that window to the full width of the screen while retaining the existing height and vertical position. The same goes for the top and bottom of the window as double-clicking the up/down arrow on the edges of the window will expand the things vertically to the edges of the display while keeping the width of the window intact.

It’s a handy trick that I will be using quite a bit from this point forward. Sure, we have all sorts of left/right, top/bottom snapping in Chrome OS, but I find myself rountinely moving windows around my larger screen in a less rigid way. For me, the ability to quickly get a full-height window without forcing things to one side or another via window snapping will be a handy trick to know. Hopefully, it helps some of you out, too.