Yesterday I came across a colleague splitting his windows left and right to compare two files. I immediately recognised this feature missing from my macbook, where did this mysterious feature come from why was it lacking on mine? Then another part of me woefully thought, “you don’t need that… developers use diff!” hint opendiff file1 file2 to use FileMerge from bash. Yes I do see the point in moving windows around at whim, what if I wanted to compare browser text or images and not files themselves?
Turns out, there’s a name to snap windows to the left and right: Window Managers.
Spectacle has snappy hotkeys that allow you to shift windows left and right. Tapping the shortcuts repeatedly also allow you to resize the windows 1/3, 1/2 and 2/3, rather intuitively. However, one thing missing was being able to drag windows to the left and right while automatically positioning windows to the left half or even top left quadrant.
Enter Magnet which allows you to snap windows to the corners and sides just by dragging. They also a set of keyboard defaults utilising ⌃ ⌥ which make it quite easy to remember.
But what if you snapped to the half left screen, then wanted the option to automatically choose a companion window to fill the other half? OSX has a built-in feature that does exactly this. Inconspicuously concealed in the green maximize button.
However, I found the green button’s snapping feature one step too far. It achieves the split screen by maximizing both screens. Thus the top bar becomes hidden and I need to close them one-by-one. Yes convenient, but with too many clean up steps.
I hope that round-up helps you with moving your windows around!