Fix Mac Window Management With These 5 Apps
macOS
Quick Links
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Apple’s Window Tiling Is Half Baked
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Rectangle Is the Best Free Tiling App for Mac
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Moom Is the Best Choice if You Want to Really Customize Your Window Layout
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Lasso Takes a User-Friendly Visual Approach
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Amethyst Is a Free App That’s Great for Keyboard Shortcuts
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Swish Lets You Tile Your Windows Using Trackpad Gestures
Apple introduced window tiling in macOS 15 Sequoia, but it wasn’t quite what many of us had hoped for. If you want a more powerful and intuitive way to organize windows on macOS, third-party apps are still the way to go.
Apple’s Window Tiling Is Half Baked
When Apple announced that window tiling and snapping would be a feature in macOS Sequoia, it was assumed that the company was about to “Sherlock” all the third-party apps that provided that functionality. This didn’t happen because Apple’s implementation turned out to be massively undercooked.
The biggest limitation is that it only supports snapping windows into halves or quarters. This is fine if you’ve got two or four windows open and want them all to be given the same amount of space on the screen. But if you’ve got three, or five, or more windows open, or you want one to be bigger than another, then you’re going to have to revert to manually moving and resizing things. This is what tiling is supposed to avoid.
There are a few ways to use the feature: drag a window into a corner of the screen, hover your mouse pointer over the green Zoom icon in the top-left corner of a window, or access it from the Window menu.
Probably the quickest way is to learn the keyboard shortcuts you can see under the same Window menu. There are only a few options, but Shift+Fn+Control and hitting the cursor keys will tile your last two used windows and is pretty useful.
But it’s not nearly as good as it might have been. If you juggle a lot of windows as part of your workflow, you need a third-party app to manage them.
Disable the built-in tiling feature before switching to a third-party app. Go to Settings > Desktop & Dock and toggle off “Drag windows to screen edges to tile.”
Rectangle Is the Best Free Tiling App for Mac
Rectangle is the perfect example of an essential single-purpose app. If you just want simple, no-nonsense window management for free, you can’t go wrong.
It has lots of options. You can snap your apps into halves, quarters, thirds, or sixths. Plus, there are smaller but useful things, like being able to set a window to expand to the height of the screen or bump it up against one of the edges.
You can access Rectangle through the menu bar, by dragging windows to areas of the screen, or through keyboard shortcuts (and you can set up your own shortcuts for your most-used settings).
What you can’t do is organize a ton of windows with one click. That’s one of the features reserved for Rectangle Pro.
Magnet
is a
popular paid alternative to Rectangle
with similar features.
Moom Is the Best Choice if You Want to Really Customize Your Window Layout
If you need a lot more control over your window layout, take a look at Moom. It costs $15 and is hugely customizable.
It’s a great choice for power users with multiple displays who run lots of apps. Moom offers lots of ways to use it, including via the green Zoom button on windows, through the menu bar, by snapping windows to the edges of the screen, and through configurable keyboard shortcuts.
There’s almost no limit to where you can put your windows. As well as pre-defined positions, there’s a Grid tool that, by default, splits the screen into 24 segments. Just select the ones where you want a window to be placed. It enables you to create complicated layouts, which you can save to use again and again.
And if that isn’t enough, there are also options that make manually moving and resizing windows easier.
Having so many features means the app comes with a bit of a learning curve, and it might be overkill for many people.
Lasso Takes a User-Friendly Visual Approach
Like Moom, Lasso offers a grid-based layout system but is easier to get started with. Select the window, launch the app, and then pick which parts of the grid you want it to fill.
The grid splits the screen into 4×4 by default, but you can expand it to as much as 20×20 if you’re really ambitious. You can save your layouts and assign them to keyboard shortcuts to make them easier to re-use, and it works great when you’re organizing apps across multiple displays.
It would be a bit much to say that Lasso makes window management fun, but it definitely has the intuitive feel you’d expect of the best Mac apps.
Amethyst Is a Free App That’s Great for Keyboard Shortcuts
If you’d prefer to keep the app out of the way and use keyboard shortcuts to tile and arrange your windows, Amethyst is the way to go. Because there isn’t much more to it than a settings screen, it takes a little getting used to, and a lot of users might prefer one of the more graphically-inclined apps on this list.
But it’s free, powerful, and especially good if you make heavy use of Spaces. You can throw an app to another virtual desktop with a quick keyboard combo, and automatically tile it with the other open windows once it gets there.
You can add all the tiling layouts you need, and float specific windows in front of those tiled apps. And you can do it all without ever having to touch your mouse or trackpad.
Swish Lets You Tile Your Windows Using Trackpad Gestures
Swish is a paid app that takes a unique approach to window management that’s ideal for MacBook users. Instead of the pre-defined layouts, you sort your windows into the positions you want using trackpad gestures. Just do a quick two-finger swipe up and across to move an app into place—you can use 2×2, 3×2, and 3×3 grids, with haptic feedback to guide you.
That’s not all. There are more gestures for things like opening or minimizing windows, and quickly moving apps between Spaces. It takes a little time to master, but if you’re a big user of trackpad gestures in macOS, you should find it soon becomes second nature.
It’s possible that Apple will continue to develop its window management tools in later versions of macOS. Until then, though, the third-party apps that offer more options and greater flexibility are still going strong.