Drag a window to the edge
On macOS 15 or later, drag a window by its title bar to the left or right edge of the screen and let go: it fills that half. Drag it to a corner for a quarter, or to the menu bar to fill the screen. Holding the Option key while you drag shows the tiling spots straight away.
Use the green button
Hover over the green button in a window's top-left corner. A menu appears with Move & Resize options (left, right, top, bottom and quarters), Fill & Arrange options that place two or more windows side by side, and Full Screen. The same choices are in the Window menu under Move & Resize.
Keyboard shortcuts
macOS 15 and later also have shortcuts for the active window. On older keyboards press Fn instead of the Globe key.
| Shortcut | What it does |
|---|---|
| Globe/Fn + Control + ← or → | Tile the window to the left or right half |
| Globe/Fn + Control + ↑ or ↓ | Tile the window to the top or bottom half |
| Globe/Fn + Control + F | Fill the screen |
| Globe/Fn + Control + C | Centre the window |
| Globe/Fn + Control + R | Return to the previous size |
Turn tiling on or off
Open System Settings › Desktop & Dock and scroll to Windows. There you can switch off dragging windows to the screen edges or to the menu bar, the Option-drag shortcut, and the margins between tiled windows. Switching these off is useful when you use a separate window manager, so the two don't both react to the same drag.
Split View on older macOS
Before Sequoia, the main built-in option was Split View: hover over the green button, choose to tile the window to the left or right of the screen, then pick a second window for the other side. Both windows then live in their own full-screen Space.
Where built-in tiling stops
- It only arranges a window when you ask. Open a new window and it lands on top of your layout again.
- Every window you add has to share the same screen, so with four or more each one gets cramped.
- There's no way to move between windows in order, or to keep a window's width while the others change.
When to use a window manager instead
If you spend the day with an editor, terminals, a browser and docs open, a window manager does the arranging for you. LanesMac puts every window in a full-height column on a strip that runs past the screen edge. New windows open beside the one you're using, nothing overlaps, and nothing gets squeezed: you move along the strip with ⌃⌥← and ⌃⌥→ or a two-finger swipe while holding ⌃⌥.
If you use LanesMac, turn off "Drag windows to screen edges to tile" in Desktop & Dock so macOS doesn't tile a window that LanesMac is arranging. LanesMac's setup check (Settings › General › Setup) also tells you if something else gets in the way.