How do you turn on "windowed fullscreen" in TF2 and other Source games?

I'm sure Arda mentioned this in chat, and it was mentioned in the site too, but for the life of me I wasted 15 minutes trying to get back into TF2 after alt-tabbing out, then wasted 15 minutes trying to find the relevant piece of information again.

So I'll ask: how do you turn "fake fullscreen" (windowed mode maximized without border) in TF2, L4D, HL2 and the other Source games?

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1 Answer

Use the following as your command line: (From the library right click on the game, then pick Properties → Set Launch Options.)

-sw -noborder

-sw means "Start Windowed." -noborder tells Windows to not draw borders (titlebar, window buttons) around the window.

You can also designate screen size (e.g. -w 640 -h 480), skip the intro video (-novideo), turn on low violence mode in L4D (-lv) and other options that may or not mean anything to you. A fuller list can be found here.

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