10 PCWorld JANUARY 2022NEWS HANDS-ON: FENCES 4
automatically groups any icons on your
desktop into a shaded region of your
desktop, called a fence. (Stardock provided
us a license key to evaluate the software,
which is available for both Windows 10 and
Windows 11.)
These fences are proto-windows: regions
of your desktop that you can resize and
reorganize, so that your icons move to fill the
available space and configuration. By
default, Fences organized my small group of
desktop icons into separate fences for
documents, apps, and folders, grouping
them neatly on the right-hand side of my
main display. And by default, future files
saved to your desktop stay on your desktop,
not within a fence, which is unfortunate.
While you can manually set rules for routing
files by name, type, and other characteristics
to a specific fence, which is where the power
and versatility of this software truly shines, it
would have been nice to have an option to
continue automatically routing files to fences
using these initial rules.
That’s essentially what Fences is designed
to do: It serves as an auto-filing system of
sorts, automatically routing files and folders to
the correct fence to clear up your desktop.
The problem, of course, is that those Fences
still show those files—a problem for those
users who prefer a clean desktop, anyway.
Fences solves this by allowing you to click the
title bar of each fence, which rolls up the
fence, concealing its contents.There’s one other feature that Fences
pulls off fairly well, capitalizing on Windows’
poor communication skills. You may or may
not know that Windows allows you to quickly
reveal your desktop by navigating to the
right-hand edge of the taskbar. That means
the very right-hand edge—there’s just a tiny
sliver of invisible screen real estate that
triggers this function. When you do so, your
windows disappear and you’ll see
everything that’s on your desktop. (The
Win+D shortcut is a much more efficient
way of accomplishing the same task, but not
everyone knows that keyboard shortcut
[fave.co/3DXGACP], either.)
In Fences, that functionality is
supplemented by a second keyboard
shortcut, Win+Space, which toggles your
Fences—and the files you want to interact
with—without banishing every window on
your screen. The appeal here is obvious: Your
desktop is simply a space upon which to store
files, so accessing those files, and only those
files, makes sense. I have one quibble. As a
lefty, I mouse with my left hand, the same side
where the Win key resides, which made it all
a bit awkward. Toggling the Fences on and off
with the Win+Ctrl+Space keys is slightly
better, but not much so.
To sum it all up, Fences is something like a
digital housekeeper. If you’d like someone to
come in and tidy up the place for you, Fences
may be worth checking out, especially given
its low price tag.