Window Tiling In macOS Sequoia

With macOS Sequoia you can now tile windows to quickly snap them to halves or quarters of the screen. See all of the ways you can do this including the Menu Bar, the green button, keyboard shortcuts, and dragging. You can also combine previous window resizing options for more arrangements.

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Video Transcript: Gary from MacMost here. macOS finally gets Window Tiling. Let's take a look. 
So with the initial public release of macOS Sequoia we finally have Window Tiling in macOS. Here's how it works. I've got a bunch of different windows on my Desktop here. I've got two Finder windows, a Safari window, and a Notes window. They are all overlapping. The idea with Window Tiling is to be able to precisely position these so that, perhaps, they don't overlap. For instance I may want this to be in the top left quarter, this window to be on the right half. You've got a whole variety of different ways in which you can do this. You've got some menu commands in the Menu Bar. You've got Keyboard Shortcuts. You've got the Green Button at the top left corner of all windows and you can drag the windows into position. Let's start with the Menu Bar. 
So here in the Window Menu you've got a variety of different things. Let's start here at the top and you'll see that Zoom is still there. Now, if you remember Zoom will sometimes take a window to the maximum size filling the entire screen. But, if the window doesn't need all that space, like the document doesn't actually need the full screen to be displayed, then Zoom will just fill to the largest size the window needs, which frustrates a lot of people. They want it to fill the whole screen. So now we've got Fill. Fill actually does this. Notice the Keyboard Shortcut is Control and then the fn or Globe Key and F for fill. When you choose this you can see the window fills the maximum amount of space on the Desktop. 
Now a really cool thing that Window Tiling does, and you're going to see me use it throughout this tutorial, is the when you change the position and size of a window like this with one of these commands you can get it back to the original position and size by dragging it. Watch what happens when I drag this window. It pops back to that size. So keep that in mind. The next options here is Center. This will take the window, it won't resize it but it will Center it like that. 
Now let's look at the next set down here. Under Move & Resize we have all of these different options. The first four are for halves. So we can go left, right, top, or bottom filling half of the available space. So we have Keyboard Shortcuts for this. They are always Control and then the fn or Globe Key and then one of the Arrow Keys. It makes sense to use the left arrow key for the left half, for instance. If I choose this you can see the window pops over to the left half. Just like before I can drag it and you can see it goes back to its original size. There is a Menu choice for this under Move & Resize as well. It's at the bottom, Return to Previous Size, Control fn and R. 
The next set here allows you to do Quarters. So you can do Top Left, Top Right, Bottom Left, and Bottom Right. So you can choose one and you can see how that window pops over into the top left corner. 
The next set here allows you to Arrange Multiple Windows. So when I use one of these it's going to take the topmost window and the next window and arrange them side-by-side or one above the other with the darker one being the current window. So if I choose right and left the current window, this Finder window, will go to the right and the next window below that will go to the left. So you can see how it took the Safari window, the next one, and put that over to the left. I can drag this window back. When I drag this window away it also goes back to its previous size. You also have one called Quarters which will take the top four windows and put one in each quarter of the screen. 
Now there are more options than just these. If you hold the Option Key down while viewing this menu, note that you can get Left and then Quarters, Right and Quarters. What this does is it uses three windows. The main one goes to the left and then the next two are tiled one above the other on the right. The same for these other options here. 
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Now note the next menu item down here is Full Screen Tile. So this is Split View which has been around for years. This hasn't changed. You still have access to be able to move this window to the left side as a new space and then choose another window for the right side. This is a separate space now in Mission Control as you can see. It works just like before. So I can Dismiss it here and these go back to a single Desktop like before. You also have Full Screen which has always been in the View Menu. You go to View. You could enter Full Screen like before and it takes that current window full screen in Mission Control like that. 
Now the Menu Bar is probably not the most convenient way to access these. There's another way right inside the window. That's to use the Green Button. All you need to do is move the pointer over the Green Button and a Menu appears. Notice that the Green Button gives you similar options to the Window Menu, Move & Resize submenu. You've got Halves here at the top and you've got Fill and Arrange here. But it gives you kind of a  subset. You can use Fill there. You can go to the left and have the next window go to the right. You go to the left and have the next two windows Tile to the right. Or you can do Quarters. Like with the Menu if you Hold the Option Key down you get more options. So Fill changes to Center and then these stay the same except priority is given to the right side instead of the left side here. You still get Full Screen, Enter Full Screen Left and Right for Split View like had with what you had with the Green Button before. So you can use one of these options here. I'll go to the right side with this window and just like before I can drag away and it returns to the size it was before. 
But that is still not the easiest way to use Window Tiling. The easiest way is to Drag a window. If you take a window and you drag it to the left side of the screen notice how you get this rectangle showing you the left side. If I drop it there it takes up the left half. I didn't have to use the Menu or the Green Button to do it. It works the same way. I can Drag away to go back to the regular size. I can go to the right side as well. I can also go to the Top to Fill the screen. But don't go all the way to the Top because that brings up Mission Control. Just go up into the Menu Bar and then you see it fill the screen like that. You can also go to corners for quarters. So I can go to the bottom left corner and the top left corner. Notice I can do it for under the Menu Bar. That's where the pointer is right now. It's not quite at the top left. I don't even need to go all the way to the side which is useful because going all the way to the side may trigger Mission Control going to the next space. So keep that in mind. 
But there is another way to do this. That's to hold the Option Key and Drag. Instead of going all the way to the edges if you're just dragging around hold down the Option Key and you can go to the left half, right half, without you needing to go all the way over. So it makes it a little easier to drag and drop windows into position like that. So if I wanted to put these two windows in the right two quarters, like this, I can drag to the right and position it right there. Let's drag this one to the right and position it right here. Then let's drag Notes, say, to the left. I'll hold the Option Key to do it. Now I've got my windows arranged nicely. 
Now previous ways of positioning windows still work. So keep that in mind because this gives you more options. For instance, let's say I want to take this Notes window and make it the left side of the screen. I'll drag it over to the left here and drop it there. Let's say I want to make this Document's window the right side of the screen. So I'll drag and drop it there. Then I decide I want more room for Notes than I do for the Finder. I can grab the left side of the window, just like before, and resize it. Then I could decide this is all I need. Now when I drag the right side of the Notes window it still snaps to the edge, just like it has for many versions of macOS. So I can position it really easily to perfectly snap to that. Snapping works really nicely. Just push through if you want to go beyond. But otherwise it will kind of click into place there. You could do all of the other shortcuts that you had too. So, for instance, if you had a window like this you can drag the top, Option Drag drags both the top and the bottom. In the corners Option Drag will drag all corners like that and you can double click on a side or corner to have it snap. So I can snap this to bottom by double clicking on the bottom. I could double click on the top left corner and that corner will snap there. So I could, for instance, preposition this window and have it lock into place here and then double click on the left side to have it snap to the left side of the screen. 
Now there's also a trick where you use Command Drag to drag a window without bringing it to the front. So if I drag Notes here it brings it to the front. But if I hold the Command Key down and drag notes you can see it stays at the layer that it is at. I can still drag to the left or above or hold the Option Key down to have it tile. So you don't need to have it be the frontmost window to do that. Also I know people like to use the Accessibility Function of the three-finger drag under Motor Pointer Control and then Trackpad Option. You can turn this on and you can set three-finger drag to be on. When you do that you can use three-fingers on the trackpad to drag around rather than clicking and holding. Then you can still can use Tiling with three-finger drag. 
Mission Control works like you would expect. If you have another Desktop you can simply tile windows there. So I could drag this window to this Desktop. I can drag it to the left so it takes up half of that. I can go over to this Desktop and drag this to the left and all of that. Mission Control in Spaces doesn't get in the way of any of this window Tiling. 
You also can use it with Stage Manager. So if I turn on Stage Manager here I've got my App Sets here and I can still tile this and split this over to the right like that. This just repositions the window. So when I go back to this App Set it is just in that position. 
Now there are some settings for this. If you go into System Settings and then you go to Desktop & Dock. Scroll down until you get to this section here that is under Windows and there are three options for Window Tiling. 
First is Tile by Dragging Windows to the Screen Edges. If it is getting in the way you can turn this Off. 
In addition you've got the Hold Option Key while dragging. If that's getting in the way, maybe there is an app that you use where you have to hold Option down a lot. You can turn this Off as well. 
There's a third option here where if you had it on already you may have wondered why I didn't have a gap between Windows When Tiling. That is this option. You turn this On and now when you Tile windows, like I'll take a Safari Window and go to the left, you can see I've got the gap here. I'll take Notes and go to the top right, and I'll take this Finder window and go to the bottom right. You can see I get this gap between everything. That's all because of this Tiled Window's Have Margins setting. 
Now some notes here. Not all windows can be resized to any size. For instance, System Settings has a fixed width. So if I go to Tile this to the left quarter you can see how it overlaps that a bit because you can't get System Settings any smaller. Regular screen resolutions actually take up less space than what's needed. At my really low resolution for these tutorials I'm using more space. 
Calculator window is the same thing. If I try to put that on the left side here it's not going to make it any larger. This Calculator window is fixed at this size. 
Some windows just have a minimum size. For instance this iMovie window here. You can't make it any smaller than what I've already go it. So if I tried to move it to the right side of the screen you can see it's not going to take up only half the screen. It is still going to fill all of it at this resolution. 
If you're disappointed that the quarters here don't have any keyboard shortcuts don't worry. You can set those as well. You need to use the exact name of the Menu item, just like any Keyboard Shortcut but you can ignore the special symbol there on the left. So, for instance, for Top Left if I wanted to set a Keyboard Shortcut for that I can go to System Settings and then to Keyboard and then Keyboard Shortcuts and then under App Shortcuts I can add one. I'll keep it for all applications. Call it Top Left. I'm going to set it to say Shift Command and then the left square bracket, like that. That makes sense kind of for Top Left. Now when I look here in the Window Menu I'll see that it is set to that. I can use that keyboard shortcut for Top Left Quarter. So I can assign to the other three as well. 
For most Mac users these new window tiling features are a welcome addition and can make your Mac Desktop a lot neater. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 6 Responses to “Window Tiling In macOS Sequoia”

Sheldon

6 months ago

Thanks bunches...it probably is me, but this feature seems to work better with stage manger off?

Gary Rosenzweig

Sheldon: should work the same, but having something rolled to the left side is not ideal when you want to see Stage Manager App Sets there.

Gwan

Is it possible to use the combination of Control (^) and the Globe (fn) key to create custom keyboard shortcuts in macOS under Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > App Shortcuts? I tried assigning the Move & Resize functions to shortcuts like ^ + fn + [ or ^ + fn + ], but it didn’t work.

Additionally, is there a way to assign keyboard shortcuts to the Move & Resize > Quarters options?

Gwan: You cannot use the Globe/FN key in custom keyboard shortcuts. So use a Command, Control, Shift and/or Option as your modifiers. Yes, you can assign a keyboard shortcut to "Quarters."

Martin B

Would be good to have the ”Split view” functionality of iPadOS on MacOS too I think, i.e. that if you put two windows side by side, draging the space between them would change the width of both windows at the same time, but they would still stay attached together.

Martin: That's been available on macOS for many years. In Sequoia, you choose Window, Full Screen Tile or use the Green button. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKa9hjcCQnA