Is virgo the smallest virtual desktop manager ever?

When you’re regularly trying out new software, it’s important to look for anything odd or unusual, any sign that a program might not be what it seems.

The Windows "virtual desktop manager" virgo seemed like a great example. A 3.7KB download? Which unpacked to a single 8KB executable? There had to be something wrong here. Surely?

Well, no. And apologies to the developer, because virgo is entirely legitimate, a real, open source virtual desktop manager for Windows, crammed into the most lightweight of frames.

Virgo’s interface is basic, as you’d expect. It adds a tiny icon to your system tray, showing the current desktop number, and that’s it.

The program supports four desktops, and you can switch between them by pressing Alt+1…4.

Moving the current window from one desktop to another is as easy as pressing Ctrl+ the new desktop number.

There’s no way to change these hotkeys, but if they conflict with something else then you can turn them off for a while by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S. Use the same hotkey later to turn them back on.

That is the complete feature set, but virgo’s simplicity -- and the fact that it’s open source -- means anyone with the smallest amount of coding experience can tweak it for themselves. If you can guess what this line from its code means, for instance…

#define NUM_DESKTOPS 4

…Then you can probably also figure out how to make it support 8 desktops, instead.

Virgo is available now for Windows XP and up.