Window Arrangement Tips Every Mac User Should Know

Learn how to move and resize windows on your Mac without using third-party apps. You can easily arrange windows as you like and even snap edges to the screen or other windows.


Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look to how you can move and resize the windows on your Mac.
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Now there are plenty of videos out there that will tell you how to use third party apps to arrange the windows on your Mac. But if you don't need precise constant control of your windows then you've already go some great tools built into macOS to allow you to move and size the windows as you like.
First let's take a look at how to move windows. If I want to move this window here on my Mac I would click and drag at the top. Now, of course, I don't want to do that where there is a button or other control. I want to do that in a blank space. Like over here or over here or in-between these buttons. If I click and drag I can move the window around and position it where I want.
Now to resize a window I can grab either the edges or the corners and then drag. So, for instance if I wanted to make this window wider I can grab the right edge. Notice how the pointer changes to arrows facing in both directions indicating that I can move left or right. So now I can click and drag and move the right side of this window. You can do that with any edge. So at the top. I could do it with the bottom. I can do it with the left. I can also do it with corners. So the bottom right corner will allow me to resize it moving the right and bottom at the same time. I can do the top left or any of the other corners as well.
So those are the basics. You can do anything by just knowing that. But let me show you other ways to use those tools. For instance, you can use modifier keys with them. If I were to move an edge, like the right side here, while holding the Option Key down then both the left and right sides move at the same time. Likewise if I were to Option Drag the bottom the top and bottom move at the same time. Likewise with the corners it works the same way. So if I were to Option Drag the bottom right corner, the bottom right corner and the top left corner would move together basically allowing me to resize all four sides of the window at the same time.
Now I can also double click and what will happen with any edge or corner is it will snap to the far side of the screen. So, if I double click, say, on the right side you could see how the right side moves all the way to the right side of the screen. If I were to do that with the left side it would snap to the left. The bottom would snap to the bottom. Likewise, if I were to double click on the bottom right corner, the bottom right corner of the window would snap to the bottom right corner of the screen. You can use this with the Option Key. So we saw before how Option Drag affected the edge and the opposite edge. If you Option double click then you can see both the left and right sides will snap to the sides of the screen. The same thing with the corners. If I were to Option double click any corner then the opposite side would also snap to the other corner. So in other words you can choose any of the four corners and Option double click and it will take the window to fill the entire screen. This is sometimes called maximizing the window.
Now the Shift Key does something a little different. With the Shift Key instead of this side and this side both moving at the same time, it is this side and the adjoining sides. So top and bottom. So Shift and Drag moves the top, bottom, and right side. Or if I'm going it with say the left side it moves the top, bottom, and left side. I can even do it with the bottom or top. Move the bottom or top and the left and right sides. So in other words holding the opposite edge steady. What about the corners? If I were to use the Shift Key and drag there then it still moves just that corner but it will keep the same ratio. So you can see here no matter where I move the pointer it is always going to keep the same width height ratio for the window.
Can you combine Option and Shift? Yes! You do Option and Shift in the edge then you could see how it is going to actually allow you to resize the window but keeping the same ratio. In other words if is resizing from the center point. It does that with the corner as well. So those are all the different ways to move a window. What if you want to be precise? What if I want to move this window all the way to the left edge. Well, there is automatic snapping when you move or resize a window. So I can move this window around. If I move it to the left it will snap and I have to push a little bit further to go past. So it is very easy to have it snap to the edge there. The same thing with any side of the screen. Top, bottom, right, left.
The same thing happens with a second window. We've got this other Finder window here. If I move it to the left here it will snap to the right side of the other Finder window. If I keep pushing it will eventually go past it but it makes it really easy to have the two windows fit together perfectly like that. When you're moving windows then you can use the Option Key to actually turn that off if you need to. So if for some reason you don't want it to be right up against the other one but maybe a few pixels over or before you can hold the Option Key down and now snapping is now off. So maybe I can create a little bit of a gap between these two if I like.
Now when resizing a window snapping also occurs. So I can grab an edge here and it will snap to the left side very easily. The same thing if I were to resize a window it will snap to another window like that. So snapping is both for movement and sizing of windows. So this makes it very easy to actually have two windows take up space and look good together. I can snap to the top left hand corner there. I can take this window and snap it to this corner right here very easily and then I could double click on the bottom right corner there. You can see it moves that window to fill the space. I can double click on the bottom of this window here. You can see how I was pretty easily able to have these two windows fill perfectly the space and be perfectly snapped together.
Now I mentioned before how you can Option double click on any corner and it maximizes to fill the space. There if also something called Zoom. Zoom seems, in some cases, to work the same way. You can get to Zoom by going to Window and then choosing Zoom. You can also move the pointer over the Green Button there, hold the Option Key, and you get Zoom. Another way to do it is simply to double click in any part of the top of the window where you could drag to move. When you do this it will Zoom and you can see this certainly did not maximize the window. But Zooming does. It will resize the window to perfectly fit the content inside. So, if I were to change what we were looking at here in the window, so let's go to this folder here and there's a lot more there, and I were to Zoom by double clicking here you can see it resizes the window to Width-wise fit everything perfectly and Height-wise do the best it can since there is more content that can fit on the screen. If I were to change this to, say, Icon View and I can double click again and it will again change the width and height to fit what is there. So Zooming is about making the window as large as it can to fit the contents. Whereas the Option double click a corner to maximize will actually make the window fit the entire screen.
Now you may wonder is there a way to actually have it not fit the whole screen but maybe half the screen. Indeed there is. There are two ways to access this. One is to go to the Window Menu here. You're going to see Tile Window to Left and Tile Window to Right. But these are about creating a new space where you can have a split view between two different windows. That is not what we're doing here. We're trying to keep these as windows and just have one window take up, say, the right half. If you hold the Option Key down you can see these two options change to Move Window To Left Side of Screen and Right Side of Screen. So now if I were to select one of these you can see it resizes the window and moves it perfectly to fit on the right side of the screen. The same thing here with the Green Button. I hold the Option Key down and these change and you can see it's not going to present me with Move Window to the Right Side of the Screen since it is already there. But it will give me the other one and now you can see I move it over there to the left side of the screen. So if I had another Finder window I can set this one up to be the right side of the screen fairly easily and perfectly split the screen in half.
So let's look at some examples here of how you can use this to manage things. So I've got three windows here. Now the Reminders Window doesn't really need to be very wide. I want the Pages Window to take up most of the rest of the space. So I'm going to move this to the Top right here and it will snap there pretty easily. I can then drag this side to the left and have it snap here, double click the bottom and now it fills that whole space. Now I just want this to basically use the rest of the space. I'll have it snap the bottom left hand corner there and then move this and snap this nicely in place there. So it was pretty quick and easy for me to fill the screen with these three windows, none of them overlapping.
Now let's talk a little bit about having windows remember where they were because a big problem, of course, is if you close a window or quit an app and then open it again it doesn't appear in the same place. In fact, it actually does. But there are conditions on that. So, for instance, here's the one and only main Reminders window. If I Quit Reminders and then I launch Reminders again notice it totally remembers where that window was and what size it was. In Finder though if I were to close this window and then create a new one it is in a different location. So what happened there? Well, the key was in looking at exactly what we did. We went to File and then New Finder Window. It is a new window. It's not the window we had before. This window isn't going to remember the position of the previous window. This is a new window. So why did it appear here. Well, where is this new window? It's in the Documents Folder. If I look in my Finder Settings here I can see why I've got under General, New Finder Window, Show Documents. So, what happens is the last time I had a window Open and sent to the Documents Folder it was positioned here. As a matter of fact if I reposition this window and put it here and this is the Documents Folder and this is where I've got it, if I Close this and now I Open it again, New Finder Window, it remembers because it is the same place. It is the same Documents Folder. But if instead if I go, say, into Projects here and I move this here, this is the Projects Folder. Then if I Close it, New Finder Window is not going to Open the Projects Folder, it is going to Open the Documents Folder. It is going to remember where the last time I had a window with a Documents Folder was.
An easier way to look at is n something like Pages where you've got documents. So here's document 1 and you can see document 1 is at this size at this position. If I close document 1 and open document 2 it's at this size and in this position. So each document remembers its window position and size. Just important to remember that Folders are like documents to the Finder. Each one kind of got its own size and location.
I know sometimes a lot of people ask, well I've got a perfect layout, something like this perhaps, for when what I'm working on. How can I have it remember this? Well, you can have it remember this by simply having it not forget it. In other words don't change this. If you like how it is you don't need to close these windows or Quit these apps. Just leave them like this. You can Hide any app using the Hide or Command H function. You can Hide all of these. Then using the App Switcher you can bring them back. I think a lot of people still think that just having apps hidden is going to use up a lot of memory or something. But Mac memory management is really good. Also, of course, you can use Mission Control to create multiple Desktop spaces. So I'm going to use Control Up Arrow to go to Mission Control and I've got these windows here on Desktop Space 1. I'll create Desktop Space 2 and on that I can put whatever I want and create new windows, even new Finder windows here and other windows as well. I can use the Mission Control shortcut to go back to the other space and switch between these two spaces. You don't have to quit these apps. You don't have to close these windows. You can just go to another Desktop, do some work there even using the same apps. Like here's a Finder window and then to resume work go back over here. A lot of this is helped by the fact that usually when you quit an app, like I"ll quit Pages here, if you were to relaunch it notice how it resumes with the windows that it opened before in the same positions. Now if it is not working for that for you, you probably have that turned Off. Go into System Settings and then go into Desktop & Dock. Then go down here to the part under windows where it says Close Windows When Quitting an Application. If you have this turned On, quitting an app like Pages will also close that window. So when you relaunch Pages the window won't reopen automatically. So keep that Off if you like the positions of your windows and want them to easily resume even if you've Quit an app.
Also then remember not to use the Red Button here to close a window or File, Close. But to simply quit the app or as I showed before just Hide the app when you're not using it and that way you can quickly and easily bring it back and that window is there in exactly the position and at the size that you want. Having Close Windows When Quitting an Application also helps if you ever have to restart or you want to shutdown your Mac. Then basically you're quitting all your applications. So having this On means you're not only quitting the applications but closing all the windows. But when they come back again after the Restart then the windows will resume where they were.
But, of course, another thing you should know is that there's really very little reason to ever restart or shutdown your Mac. Shutting down is something you only need to do if you're storing your Mac longterm. At other times let is Sleep for two reasons. One is so it can perform System Maintenance while you're not using it. Also, so that when you're ready to use it you just press the Spacebar and it wakes up and you get all your windows back in the positions you had them before and you're ready to resume work.
So I hope you found all these tips useful. Thanks for watching. Related Subjects: Mac Basics (34 videos)
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