10 Tips For Using Split View On Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some tips for using Split View on your Mac. 

So Split View is a load where you can use windows on your Mac with one on the left and one on the right and nothing else on the screen. Basically full screen view but with two windows instead of one. So, for instance, here I've got a lot of windows here on my Desktop and they are all overlapping and I don't have room for them all. If I want to view just one window I can click the Green button here and it will go full screen. So there are no other windows involved here. There is no Desktop behind this. It is just that window presented full screen. If I use Mission Control with Control Up Arrow I can see I've got my Desktop and this is called a Space. So I've got a Desktop Space and I've got a full screen space here. I can have that window exit full screen mode and go back to being a regular window. 

But an alternative to this is to have Split View, which is the same thing but instead of one window it's two. There is still no Desktop behind it and you just have those two windows there and it is separate from the windows on your regular Desktop. So, to use this instead of just clicking the Green Button you want to Pause over it. You don't have too hold the Control Key down or use a right click or anything. Just pause over the Green button and you'll see all the window tiling options. Under that Full Screen. But Full Screen breaks out into three options. Entire Screen which is regular full screen like we just saw or Left of Screen or Right of Screen. When you choose one of these two options it goes into Split View. 

Now you're going to need a second window for Split View because it takes two. So I'm just going to take the window you were using when you hovered over the Green Button on the Left or Right, and then it's going to give you the other windows that are on the Desktop so you can select one. So let's select the Notes App here. I'll click that and now I've entered Split View. I've got these two windows here. It is just like full screen but you can see it's two instead of one here in Mission Control. I can exit the same way going back to having both those same windows there on the Desktop. 

So these are the basics that you may already know. Here are some additional tips if you like using Split View. An alternative way to start Split View, that may be more straight forward is to enter Mission Control like this and then find one of the two windows you want to use. Like the Safari Window here. Drag that up to the top and it will create a full screen space with that app. But don't stop there. Go and find the other window, in this case Notes, drag that up and you can create a full screen space for that. But you can also go and drag it onto the full screen space that was there before, to the left or to the right, to convert that to a Split View Space. That is a more  straight forward way to select the two windows you want. 

Now another way to do it is to take two windows that are already full screen spaces and combine them. So I'm going to turn the Safari window into a full screen space, like that. I'm going to use Control Left Arrow to go back over to my Desktop and do the same thing for Notes here. So I've got Notes as a full screen space and Safari as a full screen space. I can enter Mission Control, with Control Up Arrow, or the trackpad gesture or whatever you want to enter Mission Control. I can see the two full screen windows here. I can combine these into Split View by simply dragging one to the other, like that. 

Another way to look at those previous two ideas is that you can have a full screen window like this and then realize say you wanted to take Notes here. So go into Mission Control like this and you've got the full screen View here. There's your Notes window. Drag that up. Add it to the full screen view and now you've got Split View with those two apps. 

Now Split View doesn't have to be exactly 50-50. For instance let's go to Split View here with Finder and TextEdit, like this. We go into it and we can drag the line between them to adjust the amount of space each window has. So you can make it more or less. However, you don't always have this ability. Sometimes windows have a minimum size. So, for instance, if I were to put Safari here and add Notes to it, these two will fit together like this. But these each have a minimum size and they are added right now. So you can't actually drag this line here because you can't drag it to the right because Notes can't get any smaller. You can't drag it to the left because Safari can't get any smaller. Now when you can drag sometimes you want to return to exactly to a 50-50 split. You can do that by double clicking on the line. Just double click and it will jump to the middle and each one takes up exactly half the space. 

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Now you can exit split view in a number of different ways. One way is Mission Control Actually move your pointer to the top left corner and you'll see this button here that takes both of those windows out of split view, like that, and returns it to normal windows. But you could also just return one of these two to being a normal window and the other one retains that space and becomes a full screen window. So to do that, what you want to do is move your pointer to the Green button here. If the menu doesn't appear you can always click and hold. Then you've got some options here. One is to move the window to the Desktop. When you move this window to the Desktop guess what happens to the other window. That one becomes full screen. So Notes is now a regular window and Safari stays full screen. You also have another option and that is to Make Window Full Screen. Now when the Notes window becomes full screen what happens to the Safari window? Well, that also becomes full screen. So it takes both windows of the split view and gives them each their own space. 

Now you can also replace half of a split view with another window. So, we'll go to that Green button again. Click and hold and you've got Replace Tiled Window. So this will replace the Notes half of the split view and leave Safari up there. I can now select another window here, I'll select TextEdit and it replaces Notes. Notice that the Notes window returns to the Desktop. 

Notice here that when I'm in Split View I've got the Menu Bar here at the top. I can select the other window by clicking on it and the Menu Bar changes. Now you may be wondering how I did that because you may not see a Menu Bar in Split View. The setting for that is in System Settings for Menu Bar. Here you've got Automatically Hide and Show the Menu Bar. I've got it set to Never which is why I see the Menu Bar in Split View mode. But if you've set it for in Full Screen Only or Always then when you look at a Split View space it won't have the Menu Bar there at the top. You can still easily access it by moving your pointer up there and it will drop down.

When you have a variety of spaces in Mission Control, for instance here I've got two regular Desktop spaces, two full screen window spaces, and one split view window space you can rearrange them by simply going to Mission Control, like I am here, and dragging them left or right and putting them in the order that you want. Now this order is important because when you go to one of the spaces you can use Control right arrow or Control left arrow to go through all of the different spaces. So you want them to be in the order that makes sense for you. But note there is a setting for this. If you go into System Settings, Desktop & Dock, and you look down to Mission Control, you'll see automatically rearrange spaces based on most recent use. If you like that functionality leave it On. But turn it Off and things will stay as you put them in Mission Control. Also notice this setting here, Drag Windows To Top of Screen to Enter Mission Control. If you've got that turned On you can quickly create split view by moving a window to the top and waiting for it to bring up Mission Control. Add it there and then add another one like that. It is a really fast way to control what spaces you've got and create these split view spaces. 

On final tip here. If you like the idea of split view but you want to retain windows so you can maybe have more windows on the screen or windows behind other windows, you can just avoid using split view entirely and start using Window Tiling. You'll notice here the Green button gives you Window Tiling options including a left side tile and a right side tile. You can also access these with Window and then Move & Resize and you've got Left and Right with Keyboard Shortcuts. So, for instance, Control and the fn or Globe Key left, or the Control and the fn or Globe Key right give you left and right halves and it is very easy to be able to use any of these options here to create a kind of split view like this but things are still windows and there are still other windows behind them, like that. When you two windows that are set to left half and right half, like this, you can grab one of the sides but notice there is this little bar that will appear here in the middle. You grab that it will actually resize both windows. So it feels a lot like split view even though it is not. You can also go to Window Move & Resize and choose Arrange Left and Right or Right and Left and it takes the top two windows and sets it up like this. Or depending on you System Settings you can drag the window to the left side and it will snap to the left. Drag it to the right side and it snaps to the right. 

There's lots of ways to do it but it is a different kind of thing having two windows like this on a regular Desktop and having other windows behind as opposed to having split view. It all depends on your personal preferences. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.