PauseToScreen ‘pauses’ what is on your monitor, and shows it on an external screen (e.g. projector or TV), while letting you continue using your primary monitor (i.e. your laptop screen).
To pause or unpause, press Ctrl-Shift-P on your keyboard, or you can click the little orange play/pause icon that should appear in your taskbar tray. Usually, you’ll want to start with the same thing showing on your laptop monitor and external screen (i.e. displays mirrored/duplicated). When you ‘pause,’ your computer will switch to ‘extend’ displays mode, which allows each screen to show different things. PauseToScreen will show on your external screen a screenshot of what was on your screen when you ‘paused’ it. When you ‘unpause,’ the screenshot is closed, and your screens return to mirror/duplicate mode. Videos showing basic usage, and how to 'pin' the app to the taskbar tray are available for Windows 10 and Windows 11
Teachers often need to have something showing on the projector/big TV at the front of the classroom for the class to be working from, while also doing some other things (marking the roll, assessing student work, preparing material). Some projectors (e.g. Epson) have a ‘pause’ button that has the projector freeze what was being shown when it was pressed, however, many TVs/flatscreens that are increasingly being used in classrooms lack such a feature. Non-teachers might have similar use-cases (if you do, let me know!)
You could just use the in-built ‘extend displays’ mode and have your presentation running on the second display. This even works for things that have video. If that works for you, great! But using the mouse across displays that are not next to each other can be confusing, and PauseToScreen just makes a single thing easy to do.
Windows 10 and 11 only. Sorry Mac users, I don’t have a Mac to develop on. Sorry Linux users, there aren’t enough of you in the teaching workforce. Sorry Chromebook users, there’s no APIs to be able to do something like this in ChromeOS.
If you have any problems, please raise an issue in Github (account required), or at my issue tracker.
Find the latest installater here. The installer contains a bundled .NET framework, and does not require any Administrator access, and will install to the user's account. If you would like a slimmer installer without the bundled .NET, or to deploy to the entire system, or other system-wide deployment options, please raise a support request and we can discuss terms.