Applications such as OHist or Express Scribe may be moved around the desktop by clicking and dragging their main application frame (usually the blue bar at the top of their main window).
Individual windows within Ohist or Express Scribe may be resized by placing the cursor over the outside top, bottom or side edges, then click and drag their edges in or out. Not all windows can be resized and often windows have a minimum size.
OHist remembers the size of each of its windows between invocations and restores your selections when each window opens, so you should not need to do this every time.
Depending on your screen size, organising the desktop before abstracting topics can make life easy. Below is just one example of Ohist and Express Scribe set up to facilitate abstracting.