August 17, 2019
Three free ways to organize the windows on your Mac
If you’re multi-tasking with two apps, it’s nice to have the window for each app neatly take up half the screen. Here are three ways to do it.
Split View
This is built in to macOS. If you’ve never heard of it, you’re not alone. I just discovered this functionality recently myself. To make it work, grab and hold the green dot in the upper left corner of a window. When you let go, the window will be tucked over the left half of the screen. You’ll then be able to pick which window you want for the other half. Once you have the split, you drag between them to get the window widths exactly how you want them. You can learn more from Apple support.
Spectacle
This free utility has been around for several years. When launched, it places an icon in the menubar. You can then start organizing with keyboard shortcuts or clicks on the menubar options. It doesn’t take over the whole screen like Split View.
Tiles
I found this one by digging around at MacUpdate. It works the same as Spectacle, but also lets you drag windows to the edges of the screen to get them organized. This might be something you’re used to doing if you’ve ever used a Windows PC.
Which is best?
At this point, I’m kind of leaning toward Tiles.