If you’re playing a PC game, chances are you’re using a windowed mode. This is the mode that’s displayed on the left side of your screen, typically when you’re in a full-screen game. If you don’t want to use windowed mode, there are a few ways to quickly switch it on and off.
- Open the game’s Properties panel and select the Mode tab.
- Change the Mode setting to “Windowed.”
- Close all open windows and reopen the game to test out your newmode.
Press Alt+Enter while you’re playing a full-screen game to enable windowed mode. You can press the shortcut again to switch out of windowed mode and re-enable full-screen mode, too.
This keyboard shortcut doesn’t work in every PC game. It’s up to the game’s developer to support it, but it does work in a wide variety of games—both modern PC games and older Windows PC games going back to the 90s.
If this keyboard shortcut doesn’t work in the game you’re currently playing, you’ll need to open the PC game’s graphics settings window and choose full-screen or windowed mode instead.
This keyboard shortcut even works in some applications that aren’t games. For example, in Command Prompt, Windows PowerShell, and the new Windows Terminal, you can press Alt+Enter to toggle between full-screen and windowed modes for your terminal.
Of course, many other desktop applications, including web browsers, use F11 to toggle between full-screen and windowed modes instead.
