How to Tame Sequoia’s Window Tiling
Have windows on your Mac started to expand to fill the screen since you upgraded to macOS 15 Sequoia? That’s the idea behind one of Sequoia’s new window tiling dragging shortcuts, but it’s off-putting when you’re not expecting it. Apple understandably chose to turn these features on by default because no one would find them otherwise, but having windows change size underneath your pointer can be jarring. Luckily, new settings in Sequoia let you move windows around your Mac without having them jump around.
Before I explain, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page. Apple has changed the meaning of the term “tiling.” In macOS 14 Sonoma, when you hovered over a window’s green zoom button, you were offered the option of tiling (below left) or, with the Option key held down, moving (below right) the window to half the screen. Tiling in Sonoma invokes Split View, which creates a new Mission Control space with the active window in one half and another window in the other; you can drag a handle to adjust the proportion of the screen associated with each window. Moving simply resizes and repositions the window within the current space.
Sequoia largely dispenses with the word “tiling,” restricting it to System Settings and limiting the zoom button’s popover to visual representations of the options. (Holding down Option changes the choices as shown in the right-hand screenshot below; more on that later.) The important thing to realize is that what Sequoia calls “tiling” is what Sonoma referred to as “moving”—the window is merely resized and repositioned without changing its Mission Control space. To achieve Split View tiling with spaces in Sequoia, you must use the controls in the Full Screen submenu.
Sequoia’s New Window Tiling Drag Shortcuts
In Settings > Desktop & Dock, Apple provides four switches that control Sequoia’s window tiling capabilities, all of which are turned on by default.
Here’s what you need to know about each one:
- Drag windows to screen edges to tile: When this switch is turned on, dragging a window to the left or right edge of your screen displays a white outline of half the screen; drop the window to tile it to that size. Dragging a window to a corner of your screen and dropping it there tiles it to that corner’s quarter of the screen. If you don’t like this behavior, turn this switch off, but you can also avoid tiling by simply moving away from the edge or corner of the screen when dragging.
- Drag windows to menu bar to fill screen: I often inadvertently trigger this option while dragging large Mimestream windows for email messages I’m composing between screens. When you drag a window to the menu bar, the white outline surrounds the entire screen, and dropping the window expands it to occupy all that area. This is the same as Option-clicking the window’s green zoom button. (Remember, an unmodified click on the zoom button enters full-screen mode, just like choosing View > Enter Full Screen.) Turn off this switch to avoid accidental triggering.
- Hold Option key while dragging windows to tile: When this switch is enabled, holding down the Option key while dragging a window tiles the window, regardless of the previous two settings. Note that it says only “while dragging windows”—you don’t have to Option-drag all the way to the left or right edges to tile to half the screen. However, you do have to Option-drag to the corners or the menu bar to create a quarter-screen or full-screen window. I’m a fan of this option since it prevents accidental activation.
- Tiled windows have margins: This switch controls whether tiled windows are jammed up against one another or have a several-pixel margin on all sides. Unfortunately, it is on all sides—you could legitimately want margins between windows but not on the edges that abut the screen edges.
Because Sequoia’s window tiling merely moves and resizes windows, you can drag their edges to adjust the size in any direction. In a nice touch, when you drag a window out of a tiled position, it reverts to its pre-tiled size.
Tiling from the Green Zoom Button
You know that an unmodified click on the green zoom button puts the window into its own Mission Control space in full-screen mode, whereas Option-clicking it expands the window to occupy the entire screen. However, as I showed above, Apple has embedded many more features in the zoom button. Let’s look at the options that appear when you hover over the zoom button.
- Move & Resize: The Move & Resize options at the top let you tile the window to half the screen or, with Option held down, a quarter of the screen. These options parallel what you can achieve by dragging to the left or right and add tiling to the top or bottom half of the screen. I doubt top and bottom tiling will be helpful in many situations.
- Fill & Arrange: The Fill & Arrange options may require a better memory than most of us have. Apart from the leftmost full-screen and centered-on-the-screen options, the remaining choices tile the active window to the portion of the screen indicated by the darker rectangle, filling the lighter rectangle(s) with the most recently accessed window(s). That may be manageable if you’re tiling multiple windows you have been using in the same app. However, I had trouble predicting which windows would be included in the arrangement, particularly with the quarter-screen options.
- Full Screen: The Full Screen options give you access to Full Screen mode (in a new Mission Control space) and tile the active window to the left or right side of the screen in Split View in a new space. As far as I can tell, holding Option down changes nothing with these commands.
Tiling Using Keyboard Shortcuts
Sequoia’s drag shortcuts for tiling windows are both fluid and intuitive, but the popover that appears when you hover over the green zoom button takes a second or two to appear, which can be a maddeningly long time in an interface. Would it be faster from the keyboard?
Apple has done a surprisingly good job of providing keyboard shortcuts for most of Sequoia’s window-tiling possibilities, although the Full Screen options don’t receive any. Apple’s keyboard shortcuts all rely on the Fn key, which does not exist on many older or third-party keyboards. Unfortunately, none of the keyboard shortcuts let you move windows between multiple screens.
Choosing Apps to Tile
How should you decide which apps to tile to which sizes? On the one hand, it’s obvious—you won’t be happy tiling a massive spreadsheet to a quarter of the screen, whereas Notes or Music work well at that size. On the other hand, some tiled windows may seem reasonable but give you a nearly unreadable line length or require that you reduce the text size to an uncomfortable size. A few suggestions:
- Quarter-screen windows work well for Finder windows (top right) and apps with a single sidebar like Music, Notes, and Slack (bottom right)—anything that isn’t hurt by being shoehorned into a quarter of the screen. Such windows are too small for any app that need to display any amount of content, like a text editor or spreadsheet. Although a calendar app will shrink to fit, it becomes difficult to read. Messages (top left) has the opposite problem—a quarter-screen window becomes too wide to read comfortably—and Reminders (bottom left) ends up with lots of wasted space.
- Half-screen windows are the obvious choice for text-heavy apps like word processors, Web browsers, and email apps because the tall, relatively thin window reduces the need to scroll vertically to bring more content into view. Unfortunately, they can require undesirable compromises. To avoid horizontal scrolling, you may have to reduce the text size or zoom level or hide sidebars that display features like outline navigation, change tracking, comments, and formatting tools. Similarly, multi-pane apps like Mail may require that panes be shrunk to cramped sizes to avoid cutting off message content.
- Full-screen windows are ideal for apps like Photos, which happily expand to whatever size window you can give them. Graphics and page layout apps, which often make heavy use of sidebars or dockable palettes, may appreciate the space, as would large spreadsheets. Many other apps that seem like they would work well at a full-screen size end up with too-long lines of text or large amounts of whitespace.
Because the entire screen (or nearly so, if you keep your Dock visible at all times) is occupied, it can be difficult to work on the desktop. To reveal it quickly, either go to System Settings > Desktop & Dock and set “Click wallpaper to reveal desktop” to Always (at which point a click in a small area not covered by the Dock will reveal it) or define a keyboard shortcut to reveal it at System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Shortcuts > Show Desktop.
It might be best to consider Apple’s preset sizes as starting points. For instance, set Messages to a half-screen size, then drag an edge to shrink it to the most comfortable size. On the other side, Mail at full-screen size may be too big but could easily be shrunk to take up three-quarters of the screen.
Should You Take Up Tiling?
When I started writing this article, I was firmly annoyed by Sequoia’s window tiling. I was activating it accidentally, and when I found the controls in System Settings, it took considerable experimentation to understand what they did.
Now that I’ve spent several hours testing and teasing out all the possibilities, I believe Apple has done a decent job with the basic feature set. It’s easy to stop the accidental activation of window tiling by requiring the Option key to be held down, and those accustomed to Split View tiling haven’t lost any features, though they’re now one level deeper in a submenu.
Apple’s decision to restrict window tiling to quarter-screen, half-screen, and full-screen window sizes makes sense, but it’s also why I probably won’t end up using the feature much. I’m accustomed to two 27-inch screens that give me a combined desktop size of 5120×1440, and I’ve carefully arranged the apps I regularly use in specific places and sizes. Except for a pair of stacked Finder windows on my left-hand secondary display that are essentially quarter-screen windows, none of my other standard windows fit comfortably into Apple’s preset sizes.
I’m not complaining. Sequoia’s features are easily turned off if you don’t like them, and numerous utilities provide far more flexibility for those who want more power. While some developers may feel that Apple has Sherlocked them, others may see increased interest from users who start with Sequoia’s window tiling feature but discover they want more capabilities. If you rely on a third-party window management utility, tell us which one and what you like about it in the comments.
I use Amethyst from time to time, and I like it, in general, but usually I end up managing all windows by myself. What irritates me most of all when using such tiling utilities is that any, even the smallest, dialog invoked in any app is always tiled as a separate window in the same desktop, which often is just weird. Usage of document-based apps is another obvious inconvenience.
I really wanted to welcome Apple’s built-in window tiling with open arms. But as is so often the case, Apple chose to barely dip their toes into the concept with an anemic effort that barely even qualifies as an effort.
For me, the fact that there don’t appear to be any keyboard shortcuts for tiling is unforgivable and makes it completely useless. Add to that the fact that there are few tiling options beyond simple full, half and quarter-sized tiles.
I use Rectangle, a free window tiling utility. It’s a fantastic utility with an almost overwhelming amount of options for tiling Finder and App windows. And window configuration can have its own keyboard shortcut.
Rectangle addresses one of the concerns mentioned in this article; a half screen is too much and a quarter screen isn’t enough. Rectangle allows me to use third-screen size, as well as use a keyboard shortcut to enlarge or reduce windows by a small amount.
There was a time when what Apple gave us with their window tiling would have been welcome. But that time was 10+ years ago. There are so many great window tiling managers out there now that Apple’s offering can’t even play in the same ballpark.
From Adam’s article at the top of this thread:
Back in the day I downloaded and used Rectangle. It’s a great app and offer lots of functionality without being too overwhelming.
But somehow that kind of tiling still never grew on me. It turns out that for most apps I have a preferred window size and aspect ratio that takes into account typical docs that I’m working with or things like how I’ve configured app toolbars and sidebars. I just want my app windows to be a certain size, or otherwise (and usually the exception), rather just full screen entirely (like for browsing pics in Photos).
So I have given up on tiling in favor of configuring app windows specifically and then using simple tools like cmd-tab and/or Exposé to quickly navigate between. At work I have a large 27" panel and there much of this work can happen side by side even without tiling, just by manual placement but then such that it doesn’t mess with my carefully curated window sizes and aspect ratios.
I completely missed that keyboard shortcuts were available, so thanks for pointing that out. BUT, they appear to only be available for a few of the configurations, and they all require the use of the FN key – which is another non-starter for me. I’m sure I could re-map them somehow, but that’s just too much effort and probably would cause conflicts with something else.
After decades of use, my brain and fingers are trained to use the Command, Option and Control keys to the left of the spacebar and keep my right hand on the mouse. Using the FN key requires me to not only take my hand off the mouse, but my eyes off the screen because I don’t have familiarity with the FN key - particularly since it’s in a different location on a laptop vs. desktop and Apple keyboards vs. 3rd party keyboards (who seem to treat it as an afterthought and move it wherever they feel it’s convenient for them).
I never considered the idea of window tiling until I switched to using two displays AND have a work requirement of having Outlook, a web browser and MS Teams open at all times. I keep those on the “second” screen and use the “main” screen for all other windows, including the Finder – and that’s where window snapping finally came of use to me.
Otherwise, I’m totally with you on the toolbars, sidebars, panels and apps being sized and placed THE WAY I LIKE THEM, which often times is not how any app can control them.
I probably got the recommendation from here originally, but I’ve been pleased with the window positioning capabilities of the Display Maid utility. Not auto-tiling per se, but it does remember the size and positions of windows in sets, and allows you to switch between or restore any of those sets (e.g., a Desktop set and a Mobile set).
The main takeaway for me here is that “Sonoma” and “Sequoia” is just too confusing for a pair of consecutive release names! (Marketing wrist slap!)
But great article. I have avoided “tiling” in Sonoma because those green button options just seem clunky. The screen-edge and corner anchoring in Sequoia is more automatic and I will try it out just as soon as I trust that Sequoia is safe.
Maybe I’ll add just one bit to this. Just in case I’m not the only one who likes to use cmd-tab, but sometimes prefers to be able to go between different doc windows instead of different apps. I can wholeheartedly recommend the excellent Witch.
It does just that (and a whole lot more): it allows you to navigate between all open doc windows, even across different apps. I have mine configured to use opt-tab. It’s a great complement to cmd-tab for switching between apps. Exposé is great when you’re hunting for something, but IMHO this is way faster in those cases where you’re going back and forth between the same two or three windows repeatedly.
As someone who uses latest windows at work and macos at home, the default drag to tile options on the mac are easier to deal with. The Windows ones are too easy to engage and take effort to get away from, whereas I like the macos default of a bit of a delay until it pops the white rectangle.
I found Window Tiling rather annoying because it would sometimes (accidentally) resize my window when I had no intention of doing so.
I’m sticking to Moom for now.
And no way of undoing it, other than guessing.
Apple’s implementation is not a tiling window manager. It’s merely catching up with Win11 which is also not a tiling window manager.
A tiling window manager is ideal for those who work in terminals and work with web pages and or a lot of text like developers. I don’t expect it to do well with graphics heavy Adobe / Blender, etc. Unless you dedicate an entire workspace full screen. The big advantage is you don’t need the mouse to navigate around, move windows, resize windows, change workspaces, move windows in and out of a workspace, etc. You can typically create keybindings to launch apps, etc. If you can touch type at a reasonable speed of around 45-60 wpm you will fly like the wind with a tiling window manager. Hardly never reaching for the mouse or trackpad.
I tried the other tiling managers and Yabai was the best, with the exception being that it required SIP to be disabled. That is a big giant gaping hole in security. I tried it for a bit on a test Mac and I ended up removing Yabai and turning SIP back on.
Then I stumbled upon the new kid on the block, Aerospace. I will say it’s very early days, there be bugs here. There’s some figgly things that will hopefully get resolved. You don’t need to disable SIP. It’s missing a few features you would expect if you’ve used i3, Hyprland, etc. But so far it’s close enough for me. Seems to be actively progressing with fixes and features. The future of Aerospace appears to be bright.
Some of the issues I’ve noticed with Aerospace is that floating windows may not always stay on top. It can slide behind the tiled windows. So then a cmd+tab will find it and raise it on top. There needs to be a workspace rule so I can declare workspace 1 to always float windows while all other workspaces are tiled. There’s a memory leak in an add-on called Janky borders (helps identify the focused window with a colored border line you can customize) but quitting borders and relaunching Aerospace releases the memory. Aerospace doesn’t behave well outside of a single Space.
It’s worth trying out when you have the time to really dive into it. Aerospace looks very promising. Stable enough for day to day use.
I have been using Magnet for a few years just fine.
Yep. Magnet
Alt+ Tab to switch apps
Alt + ~ to switch app windows
It’s all keyboard all the time.
When I forget a keyboard shortcut, I use Magnet’s system menu icon. All the windowing options are clickable. All the keyboard shortcuts are listed there too.
I launch it from search when I want it. I exit from the system icon when I don’t.
I exclude heavy graphics apps from Magnet because I have my suspicions.
I don’t understand the point of any of these windowing systems. Maybe I’m just an old fogey, stuck in the past, but I am extremely particular where I put my windows and their sizes, and I don’t want any kind of auto-management or auto-rearranging. I think geographically and if something isn’t where I left it, I’m lost. It’s like having someone come and “clean” my desk for me – I can’t imagine a worse nightmare!
(True story: to get me to clean my room as a kid, my mom only had to threaten to do it herself.)
The first thing I did in Sequoia was turn off all that crap. Adam’s article showed me much I didn’t know about the tiling system, but I didn’t anything at all appealing. Why do any of you find it helpful and why?
The only system I use is Mission Control via Hot Corners – the top right shows me miniatures of all the open windows of the current Space and I do use that constantly. (Bottom right shows me the Desktop and bottom left is set to show me all the windows of the current app, regardless of which Space it is in.)
This works great and I don’t see any need for improvement. (My only complaint is that after a reboot, apps/windows don’t always show up in the Space where I left them, and it takes me 20 minutes to get everything back just the way I had it. Which is why I only deliberately reboot about once a year, if that!)
Likewise, but I don’t like Hot Corners. On my desktop system, I access it via the keyboard, using custom hot keys (the function keys all the way on the right of an Apple USB keyboard):
When on a laptop, I use the standard 4-finger gestures on the trackpad for this:
Moom: just when it looked like Sequoia’s redefinition of tiling away from Split Screen might Sherlock it, Many Tricks overhauled the whole utility to make it more powerful while somehow making it more intuitive.
Want more than just quarter- or half-screen tiling? Check. Want to save and restore single- and multi-app window layouts (invaluable if you connect and disconnect your laptop to multiple screens)? Check. Move windows to other screens? Check. Drag and drop windows onto tiling zones? Check. Keyboard shortcuts? Check. Popover from the green zoom button where you can also add your own actions, possibly organized into folders if you have a lot? Check. Chain any of these actions together into a single super-custom-action, or a loop that cycles through the next action every time it’s triggered? Check-check-check.
And if you don’t need some of the things I’ve mentioned, turn them off and only use what you like.
How does that differ from cmd-tab to switch apps and cmd-backquote to switch app windows, both of which are built-in to MacOS? Just curious.
This is getting confusing - there are now conflicting window dragging options:
I’m no longer sure how to indicate which of those you want, and I can’t get the one to enter mission control to work consistently anymore.
I’m annoyed by a different, but tangentially similar, problem. Rather than start a new thread about it…I thought I’d start here:
Since updating to Sequoia, I’ve noticed that video ads on web pages in Safari automatically open to full screen as I scroll by them — forcing me to dismiss the video before I can continue reading the article. I haven’t investigated this much yet; is there some easy way to disable this?
AltTab is a an open source and highly configurable Witch alternative to quickly switch between windows within an app. Unlike Witch, it has an option to show thumbnails.
Sorry I meant command + tab, etc. Thanks for pointing that out.
I read this article when 1st published Nov 2024; thought it was an explanation for the sudden unexplained window/tile resizing I’d started to experience. I’ve never really used tiling, I usually let windows/apps open wherever they opened & if the size wasn’t appropriate, I’d drag it larger/smaller. Shortly before the article appeared, I’d noticed that windows would suddenly change size, generally to full screen, which I didn’t like.
If I need to see 2 screens side by side, I use Divvy, an app I’ve had for many years. After reading Adam’s initial article, I checked my Windows settings in System Settings. All were turned off except Drag windows to menu bar to fill screen, which was on, I left it set that way.
Unfortunately, windows/apps are still resizing randomly. I might be in Safari (not full screen mode) when Mail - or another app - (open in background) suddenly becomes full screen. There are also times I’m using an app & while using it, the screen size changes & my cursor hasn’t been anywhere near the menu bar.
I’ve also found that Finder now opens in a much smaller window than previously, too small for my purposes, I have to do much more scrolling to get around. Even if I drag the Finder screen to a larger size, next time I go into Finder, it’s again the smaller window size.
Are there any other explanations for the random window size changes? I’m using Sequoia 15.2, pretty sure I’m up to date.
PS While typing this, both Safari & Pages (open in the background) suddenly & simultaneously became full screen.
Thx in advance for any suggestions.
That really feels like some utility going haywire. Can you look in your Login Items and turn off anything that seems suspicious?
Thanks, Adam. Checked my login items. Only about 5 things listed there, all pretty innocuous (such as Dropbox & Backblaze) & all have been in the login list for many years; nothing new. When I opened Safari to reply to your comment, Safari opened full screen, I never use it at full screen so I know it’s not a carry over from my last usage.
I have asked Apple support about this but no one’s had any useful suggestions, that’s why I turned to TidBits; often have more luck w/TidBits than Apple support for non-critical issues.
PS: since this issue started shortly before your article in November, I had thought it was due to the same things discussed in the article. Guess I was wrong & it’s possibly a coincidence.
Could it be a USB device flaking out? In other words, could your keyboard be spuriously sending a full screen shortcut command?
That didn’t occur to me. But, I’m using a MacBook Pro & its keyboard, not an external keyboard, no external monitor either. I have 2 USB devices connected: a flash drive (used for an extra backup for often used files) and an external hard drive (used for Time Machine backups.)
Both are always plugged in, can’t remember the last time I unplugged them & both seem to still function as expected. Don’t know if either could send out a random signal, beyond my tech knowledge.
Your comment makes me wonder if the MacBook is starting to fail. It’s a bit more than four yrs old, which I don’t consider “old”, certainly haven’t thought about replacing it. Maybe I need to keep a close eye on it to see if other strange things start to occur.
Thx very much.
Update: Think both the tiling problem and the small Finder window size problem were related to earlier versions of Sequoia. Updated the other day to Sequoia 15.3 & noticed the next day that both problems were gone. Since neither have recurred, suspect that both problems were caused by a quirk in Sequoia. Haven’t seen any documentation confirming this but…
I’ve tried so many ways to do this. Moom is good but too finicky for me. I wanted to like macOS’s new system, but it’s not sticking for me. Use of the FN key is a non-starter for me, and like someone else here mentioned I could remap that, but …
I’m using the latest version of Magnet. Note that the developer added some very useful features in the latest version. I can define exactly what configuration I want for windows and assign whatever hotkey I want. I can decide which configurations show in the green zoom button. It just works, and it works the way I want. It also saves settings across devices via iCloud. Magnet just has the perfect balance of simplicity and power for me.