macOS Sequoia Window Tiling Preview

Window management is coming to macOS in Sequoia later this year. See how it looks and works so far in the early beta version. You can easily move windows to the left, right, top and bottom, in quarters and more. You have many ways to access these new window management features.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at how Window Tiling will work in macOS Sequoia. 
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Now when macOS Sequoia comes out this Fall you should finally have window tiling native in macOS. This means we can easily place windows in parts of the screen, like left half or the top right corner. Now a lot may change before final release. But this is how it works now. 
So one way to use it is to drag a window and move it all the way to the left side of the screen or the right side of the screen. Notice you get this area here that indicates if you release the mouse or trackpad it will snap to this shape. So it takes up the left side of the screen. Notice also if I drag again it immediately goes back to its original size. So it remembers that size. If I go to the right side of the screen you can see I can drag it so it takes up basically right half. Then I can grab it again. Now if I go to the top you'll see it indicates it will take up the whole screen. So it will fill the space. I can drag it back to the original size very easily. You can also drag to one of the four corners. So I'll drag it to the upper left here and when I do you can see the box now indicates that it will fit the top left quarter of the screen. Now using this technique it's easy to take a Desktop that looks like this and put one window there. Take this other window and put it there and now everything is nice and neat. 
Now you can also do this by holding the Option Key. You don't have to go to the left or right sides of the screen. You can just drag it into one of those areas. Like that. But you still have to go all the way into the corner to indicate you want that. So there are two different ways to use Window Tiling just by dragging. But you can also use the keyboard. 
First though let's take a look at some Settings that alter how this works. So in System Settings we're going to go to Desktop & Dock and then we're going to look under Windows. There is a section here with three settings. So you can turn Off just the plain drag part so it won't bother you now. If I go to left side you can see nothing happens. So you can turn that Off if you find this gets in the way. You can also turn On or Off holding the Option Key. That can be particularly useful if you've done other customizations and the Option Key is being used for something else. You can also decide whether to have those margins there. So notice when I dragged this to the left here there is a pretty big margin all the way around. If I, instead, turned this Off and I dragged notice it shows the same area but now the margin isn't there when I release. Now the interesting thing is that when you turn this On it automatically adjusts anything that you've moved with Window Tiling. So you could turn it On or Off to add or remove those. But only for windows that have been dragged using Window Tiling. 
Note that this works completely independently of using Mission Control, Spaces, and Full Screen Apps. So I can still take this full screen. It has nothing to do with window tiling. This is now a full screen window and it works just like before. This only applies to when you have a Desktop space and you've got multiple windows on that Desktop and you want to arrange them. You no longer have to drag them around and resize them manually to get them to fit perfectly. 
Note that windows snapping still works just like it has for many years. So, for instance, I can tile this to the right side here and if I want to position this to the top left it is very easy to do because it kind of snaps there. If I want to drag this so it just perfectly hits the edge there, it still has that resistance there just like ti does now in macOS Sonoma and before. 
Now there are more ways to use this. First in the Window Menu you have an entire submenu called Move & Resize. You can see here you've got Left, Right, Top, and Bottom. So you have some more options here. I could certainly take this Notes window and move it to the right very easily using this menu. I can then also go back here, use Return To Previous Size, to get it back to where it was. You can see how it centers it. This menu also has the ability to go to top and bottom. So I can actually have it take the top half of the screen or the bottom half of the screen. Can't seem to do that right now with dragging. But perhaps maybe that will be added later on. So I can have this one at the top and select this window and go to  window Move & Resize and have that one at the bottom. 
There also are two other menu options here. One is to Center the window and it will actually shrink it somewhat if it is too big or enlarge it if it is too small and put it right in the middle. The other is to Fill the Screen. So this will make it still a window. It's not the same as full screen mode. But it makes it fit into the window just like dragging it all the way to the top like I showed earlier in the video. 
Now also in the menu you've got the ability to use the top left bottom right, bottom left bottom right corners. So I can go top left with this one and I can select this window and then go to top right. You also have Arrange Tools here. Arrange tools effect more than just the one window selected. So I can do left and right here. You can see how it arranges those windows. It said left and right and it has the Notes window selected, that's the one that went to the left. I can go back in here and then arrange top and bottom as well, like that. Of course the important things about this menu isn't so much the menu itself but its keyboard shortcuts. So notice you've got keyboard shortcuts to easily be able to do these things. So if I want to move this Notes window to the left it's just the fn or Globe key, Control and then Arrows. Notice arranging is that same Globe Key, Control, Shift, and Arrows. So with this Notes window selected I can do fn and Control and left, right, top, bottom. If I hold the Shift key down it's going to do it for all the windows. So to the right, to the left, bottom, top. 
Now this works best when you've got either two or four windows, so you can do halves or quarters. So, I've got four windows now. If I go to Window, Move & Resize, and use the Arrange tool I can use Quarters, like this, and you can see it arranges all four windows very neatly. If I go to use the halves, watch what happens. Left and right. Now if I switch to another app you could see it didn't change those apps. So it took the front most two windows and it moved those around. It didn't move the windows behind them. If you have three windows and you try to do everything in quarters you simply end up with an empty quarter, like that. Also some windows have limitations on how small they can get. So if you take a window like the Reminders window here and you try to put that at the bottom left quarter, like that, it's not going to be able to fit there. So you can see how it overlaps the window above it because this Reminders window simply can't get any shorter. 
Now you have yet another way to access all this. That's using the Green button in the window there. When you move your pointer over that, without clicking or anything, you get these little icons here and you can click these to move things around and tile them. Now with the Green button you also get these groups of three like this. So I can select this and it actually arranges things like you might want. But right now that doesn't appear in the Menu. Maybe that will change. 
This works with Stage Manager as well. So let me turn on Stage Manager here. So now I've got three different app sets. I can still drag this, say, over to the right here and you can see how it tiles just fine. Then if I go away and come back you can see it remembers positioning. So, for instance, in the Finder app set here I can have, say, two Finder windows open like this. Let's go ahead and position those side-by-side and then with the app sets here I can switch over to this app set, switch back here and it remembers. 
So there's a look at how Window Tiling works. It's really a convenience function. It doesn't actually provide anything that you couldn't do before by simply resizing the windows and positioning them manually. In fact before you could position windows to the left and right side of the screen and have them fill the screen so that's not new. Having them snap to quarters or having that group of three is new. But you could have put that together very easily by just resizing the windows yourself. So it is a little something to make things easier and quite honestly since a very similar function exists on Windows and Apple still gets lots of people switching from Windows to Mac it's a good for people that are switching and are on Windows relied a lot on window tiling there. 
It will be interesting to see how window tiling in the final version of macOS Sequoia in the Fall matches what we have today. Hope you found this interesting. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 3 Responses to “macOS Sequoia Window Tiling Preview”

Sheldon

10 months ago

Thanks bunches

sam

Is it true that Apple has waited so long to do this because MS had a patent that finally expired?

Gary Rosenzweig

sam: I doubt it. There are dozens of window management apps you can get now and no reports of Microsoft suing them.