Chrome OS Canary is getting inter-display window transfer shortcuts. If you’re not really sure what this means, that’s ok. Essentially what this will allow users to do is take a window that they have open in Chrome OS on say, a Chromebook, and move it between the display on the laptop and a connected monitor just by using keyboard shortcuts, and it couldn’t be simpler as keyboard shortcuts make everything just a little bit faster and more efficient, which will save users time, which then results in more time for other things, even if it’s just a few extra seconds.
As described by Google’s Francois Beaufort, the keyboard shortcuts to move windows between displays actually includes four different shortcuts altogether. The Search + ALT + left arrow keys being pressed simultaneously will move the open window to the left-most connected monitor. The same shortcut can be applied to move the window from the Chromebook or another Chrome OS machine display to the right, up, and down nearest displays that are connected all by swapping out the left arrow for the display’s corresponding keys – the right, up, and down arrows.
If you don’t use keyboard shortcuts on your Chromebook often then it can understandably become a little challenging to remember every single shortcut that’s available. Not to worry, though, remembering is easy enough as you can press another shortcut that will actually bring up the on-screen overlay of the keyboard, and this overlay will actually list all of the shortcuts, so if all else fails you will simply need to remember at least this shortcut (which is Ctrl + Alt + / keys) and it will provide you with the information on all the others in your time of need. If you want to see the shortcuts for moving windows between displays the very short video below shows this off in action. One thing to keep in mind is that as mentioned above this is for the Canary channel of Chrome OS which means users would have to switch to this channel to try and use this feature. Canary is the most bleeding edge version of Chrome, and after comes the Dev, Beta, and Stable channels, so although this is available in Canary, Canary can be pretty unstable, and this means that if Google decides to keep this feature and bring it to all users it will likely have a while to go.