ADAM ENGST 8 November 2024

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.