Mac Window Positioning Tips And Tricks

Learn how to position and resize windows on your Mac by dragging the top, sides and corners of a window, and what various modifier keys do while dragging. You can also double-click, use snapping, and use hidden menu items to quickly move and resize windows.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at some tips and tricks for repositioning and resizing windows on your Mac.
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So when working on your Mac you're going to be working with different windows. Finder windows, Safari windows, Pages windows, Numbers windows. All sorts of different windows. You're going to want to reposition them and resize them on your screen. Now a lot of people talk about third party apps to be able to easily reposition windows on the screen. We're not going to do any of that. Instead we're going to use the built-in functionality of macOS to easily place and size the windows like you want. I encourage you to not just watch this video but to actually try out each one of these things. Some of them are hard to demonstrate in a tutorial because you really have to do it yourself to see how these things work.
So let's start off here with just a single window open. I'm going to use Finder windows here to demonstrate that you could be using windows in any app or combination of apps. So here I've got a Finder window open. I can reposition it by clicking and dragging anywhere in the Title or Toolbar area at the top that doesn't have a button. So click and drag and move it around. You could also click and drag on the Status Bar at the bottom to move the window around.
Now there are eight places on the edges of the window that you can drag to resize the window. Four of them are the sides. So I can click anywhere on the side and you could see the cursor change to the double sided arrow there. If I click and drag I can drag that side of the window. I could do that with any of the four sides. I can also drag the corners. So when I drag a corner it's actually dragging two sides. The two sides attached to that corner. You can do that with any of those four corners. 
Now you can modify this using the Option key. Let's move this window to the middle here. If I were to hold the Option key and drag a side, like the right side here, you'll see that it drags the right side and the opposite side at the same time. So the right and left. Likewise if I do either the bottom or top, Option drag, it will drag the top and bottom. The neat thing about this is it will stop at the edge of the screen. So if I move the window to the left here and I Option drag the right side you could see the left side moves but only to the maximum point. It won't go beyond the edge of the window. Even if you have multiple displays and you have one off to that side it will lock there with the left side of the screen. The same with any part. Here you could see the bottom stops there at the bottom.
Now you can also Option drag the corners. This will drag that corner and the two sides attached to it and the opposite corner. Now since there are only four sides that means dragging any corner with the Option key will resize in all four directions and it will stop at the edges. See it stops there at the left. It stops at there at the top and I'm still dragging out to the bottom right.
Now Shift drag does something a little different. If you click and Shift drag a side it will move that side and the other two sides attached to it. So the top and the bottom. So with the right side moves the right top and bottom. Shift dragging the bottom will move the bottom and the left and right. Now it's easy to think of this of actually moving three sides or having the opposite side stay at the same point. What it is actually doing is keeping the same ratio. So if I have a very narrow window like this and I Shift drag the right side, the right side is going to move a lot more than the top and bottom. The ratio of the width and height will remain the same. Now that's only within limits. So as I drag this in a little bit more you can see there's a minimum height for a Finder window. So it won't go below that. Now if you Shift Option drag what will happen is all four sides will move. The center of the window will remain in the same place. So it keeps the same ratio and it will just move the sides keeping the center exactly where it was. 
You can also double click any of the sides or corners. When you double click it will extend that side or corner the maximum amount. So for instance if I double click on the right side you could see it moves the right side all the way to the right side of the screen. The top will move it all the way to the top. If you double click on a corner it will extend both sides attached to that corner to the maximum amount. Now if you double click holding the Option key it does what you would expect since double clicking with the Option key on the right side will expand the right and left sides to the maximum amount. Doing it for the top and bottom will also extend both to the maximum amount.
This makes it easy to put windows where you want them. So for instance I can take this window here and move it all the way to the left and then decide I want it to extend all the way to the top and bottom, just double click either the top or bottom and now it fills out that space nicely. Now if you double click on a corner what will happen is it will maximize that corner and the opposite corner. So in other words the entire window. I've shown this before. This is how to get a true maximize function. Just double click on any corner with the Option key down and it will fill out the entire screen. This is different than going full screen which gets rid of the Menu Bar and the Dock and actually makes a separate Desk Top that just contains that full screen app.
This is still just a window here. It can have other windows. There could be other windows floating on top of this. It just extends the size of the window to the maximum for that screen. Some people say, well you could do the same thing by double clicking on the Title Bar but that is actually not true. If you double click on the Title Bar or Option click on the green button here to zoom, also Window, Zoom, then what you get is this. It will make the window the maximum size needed to contain the content in the window. So you can see here this window doesn't get to be the maximum size at all. 
Now let's talk about Snapping. Snapping is a feature that a lot of people don't even realize that's in macOS. Snapping allows you to move the edge of a window to another edge and it will snap in place. It's best to demonstrate with two windows. So let's open up a New Finder Window here. I've got two Finder Windows. Now if I were to take this one and drag the right side. Let's say I wanted to match perfectly with the side of this. You would think that would be pretty difficult to do. But in fact if I slowly move it over here it will snap to it. If I try to move past it you could see it stays snapped to a perfect match with the other window. If I try to move it back away it stays snapped and it will unsnap if I get far enough. Now this is speed dependent. So if I move  very quickly you can see it just rolls right over that side. But if I move slowly it snaps to it. So when trying this out move very slowly. Then try it a little bit faster and then try faster and eventually you'll see the speed where you can just roll over a side. It works in two directions. So when I go this way it will snap to it and then it takes a little bit of movement to actually unsnap from the edge there. This is where it's very important to try it out. I urge you to pause the video now and try this out with a couple of windows.
This type of snapping also works with the edges. So I can move here to the left side and it will snap. Of course it snaps to the edge of the screen. But if I move to the right a little bit you can see it takes a little bit to unsnap it. It is speed dependent so if I quickly move it's going to unsnap from the side instantly. But if I move slowly it takes a little bit to unsnap from the side. Now this works with moving as well. So if I move this window around it will snap to this window and unsnap from it. 
Now you can combine these things to position windows very easily like you want. For instance I could take this first window and let's move it to the upper left hand corner. It snaps in place there pretty easily. I can then double click on the bottom and now it fills out that space. Let me move this side here to get it where I want. Now I want to do this window here. Let's just move it to the top and it will snap to the top there and I can easily have it snap to the upper left hand corner there. Now I'll just double click on the bottom right. Now I have these two windows filling out this space just a couple quick clicks and drags. 
Note that if for some reason you need to move a window and you don't want it to snap just hold the Option key. If I move this here you can see it snaps into place. But if I hold the Option key snapping is turned off.
Now here's some extra tips. If you want two windows to each fill half of the screen you can do that a couple of ways. One is go to the green button here. When you move over it you'll see Enter Full Screen and Tile Window Left and Tile Window Right. These are known as Split View. Now we don't want to use Full Screen or Split View here but if you hold the Option key down you can see these changes. This changes to Zoom, which we saw before double clicking the Title Bar. But these change to Move Window to the Left Side or Move Window to the Right Side. So I'll just select this one here and it moves it to the left. It takes up exactly the left half of the screen. Let me select this window. I can do the same thing. I could also go to Window. You see Tile and Tile. Hold the Option key down and these change to Move. So now I can move this window to the right side of the screen. So very easily I have actually set these two windows to take up exactly half of the screen. I can't move them together but I can move one and then easily drag and move the other to snap to it.
If you like you can setup keyboard shortcuts for these Move options. So this one is Move Window to the Left Side of Screen. So let's go to System Preferences, then Keyboard, Shortcuts, and I'll go to App Shortcuts. I'll add one right here. I'll call it exactly what we see here with the Option key held down. Move Window to Left Side of Screen. I'll set the keyboard shortcut to this to Shift Command left arrow and Add it. So now in the Finder here when I go to Window I could see it actually adds that Menu item in here. So you don't have to hold the Option key down to see it anymore. Now Shift, Command, left arrow will instantly move that one to the left side of the screen. I can create a similar shortcut for Shift, Command, right arrow. After I do that I could see that one in there. You don't see the left side of the screen one because the window is already in that position. If I were to resize the window you could see both of them there. So now I can Shift Control right arrow or Shift Control left arrow with any window. This is really handy. When creating that keyboard shortcut make sure you type the menu item exactly. Even the capitalization of each letter counts.
Now a lot of people love third party window managers. Apps that you can install that you'll use to find areas on the screen and then you could snap windows to those areas or provide keyboard shortcuts to do things like quarters or thirds. If you like those fine. I don't use any of those. I like to stick with this basic functionality. If I want to setup some windows in a particular configuration I find it only takes me a couple of seconds. I don't really see the need to actually learn an entire system for managing windows when I can do whatever I want in a few seconds with some of these tricks.

Comments: 2 Responses to “Mac Window Positioning Tips And Tricks”

Jeff Harrow

6 months ago

Gary, Running 10.15.5 on a MacBook Pro, when I hover the pointer over a window’s green button the only visual change I see is the “expand” icon within the green button — I can never get it to display the “split view” menu when I hover over it. I do recall once seeing such, but nary a one in site in recent memory. Might I have somehow disabled the function? Any Idea which one? Or how otherwise to re-enable it. Thanks!

Gary Rosenzweig

Jeff: Try it in different apps. Maybe the app you are trying it with is doing something different? DO you see these items in the Window menu at least?

Comments Closed.

Mac Window Positioning Tips And Tricks

Comments: 2 Responses to “Mac Window Positioning Tips And Tricks”

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