Window Center & Resizer is a utility application for Windows that allows you to easily center and resize windows on your desktop using customizable keyboard shortcuts. It is a 630 KB download — nothing to install, and no runtime to bring along.
- Named positions: Put the active window where you want it, with one keystroke. A position is a name, a hotkey, and a place on the screen — and you set that place by dragging a window inside a picture of your own screen, rather than by typing coordinates. Centring is one of these, and it is the one that ships.
- Keep the size, or set it: A position can move a window without touching its size, or give it a size as a percentage of the screen. "Put this on the left but leave it as big as it is" is a position, not a compromise.
- Resize cycle: A separate key cycles the active window through three size presets, given as a percentage of the screen's work area. The defaults are 50%, 75% and 90%, all editable. It re-centres the window as it goes, exactly as it always has.
- Customizable keybinds: Every position carries its own hotkey, and the resize key is yours to choose.
- Download Window-Center-Resize-portable.zip from the latest release.
- Extract it to a folder you intend to keep — your Documents, a tools folder, a USB stick. Not your Downloads folder, and not a temporary one.
- Run
WindowCenterResizer.exe.
There is no installer. The app runs from wherever you put it and writes nothing outside its own folder.
⛔ Keep the extracted files together in one folder. The .exe and the .ahk beside it are two halves of the same program — see below. Move the folder, not its contents.
The zip contains three files, and they belong together:
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
WindowCenterResizer.exe |
The stock AutoHotkey v2 interpreter, byte-identical to the one published by AutoHotkey. Renamed, and nothing else — renaming does not change a file's contents, and reputation follows contents. |
WindowCenterResizer.ahk |
This program, in plain text. The interpreter runs the script that shares its name. |
icon.ico |
The tray icon. |
Up to and including 2.1.0 this shipped as a single .exe built by AutoHotkey's compiler, which welds the script into a copy of the interpreter — the same shape a great deal of real malware is packaged in, and Windows Defender eventually began deleting it on sight. Shipping the interpreter unmodified ends that: the binary a scanner sees is AutoHotkey's own, not one this project made. The measurements behind that change are in build/av-baseline.md.
Check it rather than believing it. Both links are live, so they show what the engines say today rather than what they said when this was written:
WindowCenterResizer.exe— the interpreter. This is the useful one: it is AutoHotkey's own binary, so you can verify it against the AutoHotkey project instead of taking anything here on trust.Window-Center-Resize-portable.zip2.3.0 — the download itself, 0 of 74 when published.
Three consequences worth knowing before you download it:
- The
.exeshows AutoHotkey's green H icon, not this project's. An icon lives inside the executable, so giving it ours would modify the file, change its identity, and bring the detection straight back. The tray icon is correct — that one is set at runtime. A cosmetic cost, paid deliberately. WindowCenterResizer.exeon its own does nothing. Separated from its.ahkit reports "Script file not found." That is the interpreter telling you it has no program to run.- You can read the entire program before running it, which was never true of the compiled builds. It is the same code as
src/, flattened into one file bybuild/build-portable.ps1.
⛔ The compiled builds are gone, deliberately. The releases/latest/download/Window-Center-Resize.exe link 404s from 2.2.0 onward, and the .exe assets have been removed from the 2.0.0 and 2.1.0 release pages as well — older README copies, software directories and mirrors pointing at either will find nothing there. Continuing to serve those files would mean knowingly handing people something their antivirus deletes; a broken link is the better failure. If you already have one, delete it and download the current release. There is nothing to restore or exclude.
- Center Window — press the centering shortcut (default
Ctrl+Shift+C) to center the active window without changing its size. - Resize Window — press the resize shortcut (default
F9) to cycle through the size presets. - Customization — open Settings from the tray icon, or edit
settings.ininext to the executable.
To change a shortcut, click its field in Settings and press the keys you want — the combination is captured as you press it. Windows-key combinations are the one exception: the field cannot capture them, so set those by editing settings.ini directly, using AutoHotkey syntax (# is Win, ^ Ctrl, + Shift, ! Alt — for example Center=#Up). A Win-key shortcut set that way is kept, not overwritten, if you later open and save Settings.
The shortcuts only work while the app is running, so most people want it to start with Windows. Put a shortcut to the executable in your Startup folder:
- Open any folder in File Explorer, click the address bar, type
shell:startup, and press Enter. That opens your own Startup folder. Useshell:common startupinstead for every user on the machine — that folder needs administrator rights to write to. - Drag
WindowCenterResizer.exeinto that folder with the right mouse button, release, and choose Create shortcuts here from the menu that appears.
⛔ Put a shortcut in that folder, not the executable itself. Moving the .exe out of its folder separates it from WindowCenterResizer.ahk, and it will start with "Script file not found." instead of running — and even if you moved the whole folder's contents, it would leave your settings.ini behind and start with default hotkeys and presets, silently, because a missing settings file is not treated as a problem. Leave the folder where it is and point a shortcut at it.
The shortcut does not need a Start in folder set: the app locates settings.ini relative to the executable, not to the working directory, so it finds its settings wherever it is launched from.
A program that runs as administrator — Task Manager, an elevated terminal — cannot be moved by a program that does not. If you press a shortcut on one of those, the app will say so and offer Restart as administrator from the tray menu.
Anything launched from the Startup folder runs without administrator rights, so a copy started that way is subject to the same limit on every boot. If you want it elevated from the start instead, create a Task Scheduler task that runs it at logon with Run with highest privileges — the Startup folder cannot do that.
The app is portable and keeps settings.ini next to the executable. Three consequences worth knowing:
- The app is its folder, not its
.exe. Copy the whole folder to move it — to another machine, or onto a USB stick — and it carries its settings with it. - Moving the executable alone gives you "Script file not found."; moving the executable and the script but not
settings.inistarts it with defaults. - Two copies in two folders run independently, each with its own settings.
Requires AutoHotkey v2. There is no other build chain and no runtime dependencies.
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File build\build-portable.ps1
This writes the distributable folder to dist\portable\ and zips it to dist\Window-Center-Resize-portable.zip. The build flattens the #Include tree in src/ into one script and copies the AutoHotkey interpreter beside it.
It refuses to build unless the interpreter it is about to ship is the exact AutoHotkey release recorded in build/interpreter.pin — by version and by SHA-256. That is the property the whole packaging rests on, so it is checked rather than assumed, and CI re-derives the same hash from AutoHotkey's official release download on every push. If you have a different AutoHotkey installed, the build tells you so instead of quietly shipping it.
You can also just run the app straight from the sources with AutoHotkey64.exe src\main.ahk, with no build step at all.
This project is inspired by the window centering helper freeware by Kamil Szymborski. Window Center & Resizer offers a modern approach to window management with additional features and extensive customization capabilities.
Contributions are welcome! If you have any suggestions, bug reports, or feature requests, please open an issue on the GitHub repository or submit a pull request.
Copyright © 2024–2026 Liav Edry. Licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 — see the LICENSE file for the full text.
Every release of this app ships AutoHotkey, which is itself GPLv2 — up to 2.1.0 welded into the executable by the compiler, and from 2.2.0 as the interpreter binary sitting beside the script. Either way it is redistribution, so matching the licence keeps the download coherent.
Releases up to and including 2.1.0 were published under the MIT licence and remain available under it. The change applies from 2.2.0 onward; it does not and cannot affect copies already distributed.
Built with AutoHotkey v2 by Steve Gray, Chris Mallett and contributors, licensed under the GNU GPL version 2. WindowCenterResizer.exe in the download is the AutoHotkey interpreter, unmodified; its source is available from the AutoHotkey repository. AutoHotkey bundles PCRE by the University of Cambridge, used under the BSD licence.
The icon is square-dot from Lucide, used under the ISC License.
Versions 1.x were built on electron-react-boilerplate. Version 2.0.0 is a ground-up rewrite in AutoHotkey v2 and no longer contains any of that code.