10 Essential Desktop Apps Every Ultrawide Monitor User Should Have

There are many perks to take advantage of when switching to an ultrawide monitor, but at the same time, it can complicate your computer life quite a bit. Many video games don't support this aspect ratio without modification, for example. Likewise, websites are designed around much narrower aspect ratios, and so too are most productivity apps.

However, an ultrawide monitor is an excellent alternative to a dual-monitor setup. Using two monitors for work is great, but an ultrawide gets rid of that center bezel, and allows you to use the extra screen real estate in more creative and effective ways. That is, as long as you have the right software. 

While operating systems like Windows, macOS, and Linux will work just fine with ultrawide monitors, they are optimized for more common aspect ratios. Which means that if you want to make the most of your ultrawide monitor, you're going to need a few handy helper apps, and there are certainly a wealth of great options. Just be aware that not all of the apps discussed below are free, though all of the paid apps we've curated come with a free trial. So you can still give them a decent test drive before deciding if what's on offer is worth the fee.

MaxTo is a powerful window manager that you can get through an annual subscription, or a once-off lifetime license purchase. Luckily, it comes with a 14-day free trial; by the end of which you'll either happily pay the fee or decide that you can live without the app.

So what do you get for your money? The core gimmick of MaxTo (and the name alludes to this) is that you can divide your monitor up into zones that each act almost like a separate monitor. In other words, you can maximize your window to that zone, rather than the whole screen. You can customize this window grid in the rows and columns that you want, and each monitor has independent grids if you have a multi-monitor setup.

Each monitor can also have an unlimited number of presets. It also has a neat memory feature where if you open an app, it will snap to its last position in the grid template for that monitor. So you don't have to manually position your apps every time you open them. MaxTo is "hotkey-first," which does add to the learning curve a bit. Once you have your grids and shortcuts set up for your specific workflow, the time you'll save not micro-managing your windows on a big ultrawide monitor each day should pay back your time and the money spent to buy the app.

RegionToShare solves a very specific problem that ultrawide owners are more likely to run into than those who own more common aspect ratios, or who have multi-monitor setups. It exists because certain video conferencing and streaming applications only let you share either your entire screen, or just the contents of a single window.

If you have a second monitor, you can use that as a staging area for things you want to share with viewers or others on a call. However, if you have an ultrawide only, you don't have that option. So that's once significant disadvantage compared to dual-screen users. What RegionToShare does is share anything within its region of the screen with the app of your choice.

It works well combined with apps like MaxTo. You can snap RegionToShare to a window grid, or freeform adjust its size and position. Then just click the big play button, and share the app's window using the video conferencing or streaming app of your choice. Any content you move over the app's window will now be shared. This makes it simple to only share content you want your viewers to see, and neither RegionToShare or your app need to be designed to interact in any way. It's elegant, free, and invaluable to anyone who ever wants to share only a region of their ultrawide monitor with others.

WindowTop is another paid app, but has a 30-day trial, so you can decide whether it's worth the $19 asking price for three computers. What it does is quite simple, but also very powerful. As the name suggests, this app gives a window an "always on top" attribute, so that no matter what you're doing, you'll always see that window as long as it's open. By using a customized hot key, you can designate any window as the one to be on top, and its border color will change to reflect that.

If this was all the app did, that would be great, but not worth the asking price. However, WindowTop is actually packed with various additional features. The most interesting might be the PiP (Picture-in-Picture) mode. This lets you create a floating PiP window that doesn't show the contents of an entire window, but just an area you've cropped. For example, if you have some sort of website that has a dashboard you want to monitor, you can use this function to achieve it.

Window anchors offer a faster way to switch between windows than alt-tabbing, and the WindoTop developers say this is especially useful for touchscreen devices. There's also a neat opacity feature, and the ability to click-through the window you've overlaid to interact with the app below it. So artists, for example, can trace a design. Some features have "smart" elements, such as the PiP window moving itself around so that it doesn't get in your way.

We called ShareX "an essential Windows app" for a good reason. However, you might argue that people who write about technology and computers all day might be biased towards apps that make taking screenshots easier. It's already pretty simple to take a screenshot on Windows 11, and if you only do it occasionally, then the built-in tools are just fine.

However, plenty of people working in all sorts of jobs need to take and edit screenshots on a regular basis, and if that's you, then you're going to run into friction with the bundled solution in Windows. In particular, if you have a massive ultrawide screen with a high resolution, managing and editing screenshots can be a grind.

ShareX lets you easily capture portions of a screen, with a wider selection of presets than the Windows default. You can do the usual stuff like capture the whole screen or an active window, but you can also capture the same region repeatedly, do scrolling captures, screen record to GIF as well as video, and more. But the real strength of ShareX is in the "sharing" part of the process. You can easily annotate, add effects to, or otherwise transform captured images. If you've ever been tasked with creating tutorials, or compiling reports where you need to capture images or parts of documents, you'll appreciate how much of the drudgery ShareX can remove from the process. 

We name-dropped Vivaldi as one of the lesser-known web browsers you should try instead of Chrome, and while it's certainly got a lot going for it (such as built-in ad-blocking), the best feature by far for ultrawide fans is the tile grid for web pages.

In most browsers, you need to make use of whatever window-management solution you have, and arrange web pages as individual tabs. Vivaldi keeps this feature completely in-house, and you can activate a tile grid arrangement within a single browser window, setting up a workspace that fits your needs. Speaking of workspaces, you can save different pages and arrangements as switchable views, which means that if you have any repeatable workflows, you can save yourself repeatedly setting your web apps and pages up every time you need to sit down and work.

This makes it the perfect browser for anyone with an ultrawide, especially if you have a wider than usual model. Since most of what we do happens on the internet, you can make the most of that space, without the complexity of native tiling solutions. Vivaldi has a long list of other great features that make it excellent for privacy-focused users, but usability features such as a built-in feed reader and Proton VPN integration, should appeal to everyone. However, it's the philosophy of deep customization that makes it a perfect fit for ultrawide users.

Directory Opus is a paid file manager app with a 60-day free trial with registration. You might be wondering what could be wrong with the file manager that comes with Windows, and the answer is "nothing." There are still many notable File Explorer alternatives that offer something unique, such as File Pilot, which we said is like "File Explorer on steroids."

Directory Opus is of special interest to ultrawide monitor users thanks to its flexible and integrated interface. It uses a dual-pane layout that makes it easy to move files between locations, and you can adjust the horizontal width and arrangement of the panes freely, which is perfect for the extra horizonal space ultrawide monitors offer.

We also like the batch file renaming feature, its integrated search and indexing technology, and support for archive files and FTP servers. Which means you don't need a separate FTP app anymore. Power users who like scripting can build or integrate third-party tool with Opus, and if you like customization, you can go nuts with colors, fonts, hotkeys, and menu customization. There's a built-in image viewer, and fast file copying with file copy queues. It does have a relatively steep price, but if you spend a lot of time managing files on your computer, the time it saves you could make it well worth it in the long run.

Rainmeter used to be a bigger deal back in the good old days. Ironically, Windows has slowly adopted things like widgets, media controls, and easy app launching that made Rainmeter popular in the first place. Nevertheless, in the more-than-two decades that Rainmeter has been out in the world, it remains one of the best ways to truly transform the look and feel of Windows.

It's core strength comes from the community that constantly brings out beautiful new skins, changing the way you use your computer. For ultrawide owners, there are some skins that make better use of that real estate and aspect ratio.

You don't have to limit yourself to premade skins, of course. The Rainmeter engine lets anyone create their own custom skins, or tweak ones that have already been released. The average person may not need to customize the Windows shell, but if you have an uncommon screen shape, Rainmeter can give you an equally uncommon experience that's tailored to it perfectly.

Wallpaper Engine is the one "game" on Steam I have with the most hours logged, and that's because it's one of the best desktop customization apps out there. The main selling point of Wallpaper Engine is the ability to have an animated wallpaper. So you can use, for example, use a video file as your background.

Obviously, this means you can use a video that's exactly the aspect ratio and resolution of your screen, and there are thousands of community-made examples you can use right away created by other ultrawide users. Apart from this core functionality, the app supports complex multi-monitor setups with screen of different shapes and sizes. It can integrate with popular RGB software packages like iCUE and Razer Chroma, and has extensive scope for tweaking behavior.

You might think that this decorative program will be sapping both performance power and (in the case of laptops) battery power too. However, the actual app is light on resources, and it automatically pauses playback when you can't see your wallpaper. So if you launch a game or maximize apps, it gets out of the way seamlessly. It can also be configured to stop when you switch to battery power. Playlists and slideshows let you customize when which wallpapers play, or changes them at set intervals. There's honestly so much you can do, which makes the (nominal and once-off) asking price well worth it.

Lossless Scaling is an excellent solution to a very modern problem. The short version is that flat panel displays have a fixed grid of pixels representing the "native resolution." If you want to display graphics that don't match the resolution exactly, you need to perform some sort of scaling process to make full use of your screen. The nature of that scaling determines whether the final result looks good, or is just an artifact-filled mess.

Modern games have built-in scaling solutions such as Nvidia DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS. These help computers that can't render 3D graphics at the high resolutions of modern monitors by taking a lower input resolution and applying complex scaling algorithms to make it look good at higher pixels counts.

Lossless Scaling comes into the picture (literally) when you have games that don't include a good upscaler built in. It lets you scale windowed games to full-screen using your choice of method. It's particularly useful to retro gamers where an older game doesn't support your monitor's resolution or where you're looking at pixel 2D graphics. It's a key part of any ultrawide (or 4K) gamer's toolbox and while it's not free, it's only a one-time $6.99 purchase.

The venerable OBS Studio is the gold standard when it comes to recording your screen, or livestreaming it to platforms like Twitch or YouTube. This powerful open-source app supports multiple aspect ratios and lets you crop parts of your screen to share, while compositing complex scenes to record or output to a live audience.

It's a completely free and open-source app that works on macOS, Windows, and Linux. That means there's plenty of community support, and if you have the programming chops for it, you can make changes and contributions yourself if you like.

While there is obviously a performance hit when using OBS Studios, since the app needs resources to run, it's become quite a lean piece of software over the years, and any sacrifices on a modern computer are negligible. The app is also backed by several high-profile sponsors such as Nvidia and Intel, so it's long-term development prospects seem excellent.