How to speed up your work on macOS Monterey by making windows snap into place

Let your Mac rearrange all the overlapping document windows you have on macOS Monterey and see what you need, when you need it.

A long time ago, when Windows was faltering out into the world, it encountered a problem. Overlapping windows are not allowed, they must fit together like tiles. In an effort to stop Windows from taking over the world at the expense of better Macs, it failed.

Yet, as a scary thought, it remains. To this day, there are people who not only like tiled windows, they lament that they can’t do it on a Mac. However, now that we're no longer using 9-inch Macs with small or low-resolution screens, these folks have a point.

You're more likely to have multiple windows open at the same time than you were back then. Computers should make work easier, not harder, so there's a very clear point that your Mac should be able to help you. Your Mac should be able to sort through the clutter of overlapping windows and show you what you need, when you need it.

it can. Not only can a Mac do this, but there are four different ways to manage your windows like this—and they all have their pros and cons.

Apple's own solution

The Mac has always been good at remembering where you left a window on the screen, whether that's the fill window or the left side. They've always been good at remembering the size of a given window for any application.

So if you're disciplined enough, if you have a big enough monitor, and if you tend to always do the same job every day, you can drag your windows to where you want them and put them Stay there.

However, most of us have different responsibilities and use different applications. Not every app is a good macOS citizen, so not every app will remember their window position without being forced to.

Split view has clear controls

So if you do finance work in the morning and graphic design in the afternoon, it’s worth using the semi-automatic window management provided by Apple.

The feature is called Split View, and while it hasn't changed in macOS Monterey, it does get some help. Previously, you could only use split view by accident, or because you already knew it.

Now there are more visual clues that the feature exists—and how to make the most of it. The same feature is much clearer on iPad, with iPadOS 15 placing a series of dots at the top of each window. The Mac doesn't do this, but clicking and holding the green traffic light icon displays clearer information.

You can choose to take the current window (whether it's a folder, document, or application) and make it full screen. Alternatively, you can tile the windows on the right or left side of the display.

Select any of these, and your Mac will first move that window to the left or right to take up half of the screen, then prompt you to fill the other half with other content.

Once you have two application windows, each taking up half of the screen, you also get a divider control. For example, you can drag a line between the two halves so that one window is one-quarter wide and the other three-quarters wide.

When you have two windows open at the same time, holding down this green icon allows you to replace the current window with another window. Or you can move the window to the desktop, which will take it out of split view.

There is also an option to take this half-width app and make it full screen. If you close one of the two applications sharing the display, the remaining or second application will appear full screen.

It does this behind the scenes. That is, the second app appears full screen, but you see what would happen with the first app. The screen displays the application as a regular window instead of full screen. It's easy to forget that the other even exists. Therefore, split view can still be confusing.

Ultimately what it means is that you can have two documents, or two in any window, each taking up about half the screen. It's great for comparing documents and great for helping you focus on just two windows to the exclusion of everything else.

What’s happening behind the scenes is that macOS’ Split View actually takes advantage of the separate Spaces feature. Spaces is great for helping you organize different sets of work, but it can get confusing when split view is forced on you.

Split view does work as a temporary way to work on two windows, though. Spaces are great for setting up a few different workspaces. Even if you continue to use other methods of managing windows, it's useful to know about Spaces.

Third Party Window Manager

Often on Windows you find that the operating system is not doing anything and you need to purchase a third party application. This time, that's the case for Mac, and the dedicated third-party window management app you should check out is Moom.

There are other options, such as the $7.99 Magnet, but the $9.99 Moom is particularly good and has been a favorite for years.

Hover your mouse over the green dot in the upper left corner of any window and Moom will give you a series of options. With just one click, you can make the window take up the entire left half of the screen or the entire right side.

Hover the mouse over the green button, and Moom will pop up a menu offering to move the window to both sides.

You can have it occupy the lower or upper half of the display. You can instead choose to have the app fill the entire screen.

Perhaps the most useful option, though, is the sixth option that appears when you move a window with Moom. This is a backwards arrow, and when you click it, the window jumps back to where it was before you used Moom.

So you can rummage through the windows very quickly to find what you need and then arrange them in the most commonly used locations on the screen.

It definitely does a great job, and if you can benefit greatly from this window management, it's certainly worth buying Moom. However, Moom's only job is to manage your windows like this.

Other Utilities

There are other third-party utilities that do this all the time, which is just part of their many other features. Until now, it has been tempting to buy one of these because you get more features and because it's one app to learn from rather than two.

They can also be individual applications that developers focus on. For example, there's still a dedicated window management app called BetterSnapTool available in the Mac App Store for $2.99. However, it has a sister app called BetterTouchTool, which is even more valuable as it includes all the same features and more.

BetterTouchTool radically increases its window management capabilities

BetterTouchTool is an application that allows you to take full advantage of the gestures of your Mac mouse or trackpad. It added some basic window management a long time ago so that you can drag a window to the right or left, top or bottom, and have it align to fill that space.

Better touch tools. The small blue rounded rectangle is the target that appears when moving the window. Drag the window onto the target and it snaps to your predefined size and position (the larger blue area).

It's ridiculously powerful, especially considering that's not the selling point of BetterTouchTool. Window management is just an ancillary feature to its main functionality, but it's worth purchasing the entire application for these features.

Again, there is no doubt that Keyboard Maestro is worth buying for all its features, including window management. However, Keyboard Maestro is more complex to use, and there are countless things it can do for your Mac, with Move Window probably being the least obvious setting.

Another way

You can get Apple’s macOS windowing features for free with your Mac. Moom ten bucks. BetterTouchTool is available through Setapp, or directly from the manufacturer for the ridiculously low price of $7.50. Keyboard Master costs $36.

However, you can get some of these same benefits for as little as $1,000 to $2,000.

Some large monitors, especially so-called ultrawide monitors, now have a form of window management built into them.

While they vary in their ways, broadly speaking, they all divide your monitor into different areas. Each of these areas acts like a full display, and you can choose to limit an application's window to one of them.

It works, but one of the benefits of spending a lot of money on an ultrawide monitor is that you can spread out your work any way you want.

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