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The Sequoia beta is now available, so we can check out upcoming features like window tiling. This small change could have a big positive effect on your day-to-day use of macOS.
What Is Window Tiling?
There are many ways to arrange windows on your desktop. You might run most apps with a single full-screen window, or you might use several windows that overlap. Or you might use another option: tiling. When you tile windows, you arrange them on a grid alongside each other, with no overlap.
Tiling lets you make the most of your screen space and see the full contents of active windows. Previous macOS versions have only supported a very minimal form of tiling, leaving you to rely onthird-party window tiling appsto fill the gap.
How macOS Sequoia Improves Window Tiling
The upcoming release of Sequoia—macOS 15—iterates onthe Split View featurethat macOS has shipped with since macOS Mojave.
The updates to tiling include how you can initiate it, and how flexible the options are. Previously, window tiling was tied to a full-screen view, but this latest version is much more flexible.
First, you may now cause windows to tile by dragging them. Tiling options were only previously available under the green button in the top-left of each app window. Using Sequoia, you’ll see a visual indicator when you drag a window to a location in which it can be tiled.
You can drag a window into the following positions:
Effect on the dragged window
Left/Right
Half: full-height, half-width
Quarter: half-height, half-width
While the left and right targets work well, the top target can take a bit of encouragement to activate and the corner targets are very small, so you’ll need to be precise.
As well as dragging windows to tile them, you can use the green button. This approach now offers two new styles of layout, beyond the full-screen options that were available before:
Sequoia still supports the old “full-screen left/right” behavior, but relegates it to a sub-menu:
Move & Resizelets you position an individual window in one of four positions that take up half the screen: left, right, top, or bottom. Unlike Split View, it doesn’t force you to choose another window to take up unused space.
Fill & Arrangelets you tile one, two, three, or four windows at once. If there are more windows than the number you select, the ones you’ve most recently interacted with will tile.
These new options are significantly different from the previousFull Screenones. They do not hide the menu bar and they allow other windows to overlap them. Think of them as shortcuts to position and size windows, just as you otherwise would with the mouse.
Making the Most of Window Tiling in macOS
Although small bugs will hopefully be fixed, the beta gives us a good idea of what window tiling will be like by the time of release. Here are some simple tips on how you’ll be able to make the most of it.
How to Work Around Limitations
One frustration with the beta is that it can be difficult to drag windows into a tiling position withoutswitching to a different desktop space. macOS switches to the previous desktop if you move your mouse to the left of your screen, and the next if you move it to the right.
Since there is currently no way to turn off the space-switching behavior, you may want to remove additional desktops altogether and just focus on one. Alternatively, you might want to stay away from the drag-to-tile behavior altogether; you can do so by turning offTile by dragging windows to screen edges.
More Controlled Tiling
you’re able to gain a bit of control over tiling by using theHold alt/option key while dragging windows to tilesetting, which is enabled by default. When you hold alt/option and drag a window, Sequoia will display the closest window tiling target, making it very easy to tile a window on one half of the screen, for example.
This setting doesn’t currently support top/bottom halves, and corner targets are still tiny, but it may help.
Margins Can Help Your Windows Breathe
TheTiled windows have marginssetting controls the space between tiled windows. The setting toggles between a zero-pixel gap and one that’s approximately seven pixels. This gap appears on all sides of tiled windows, including next to the screen edge.
Margins can provide a cleaner separation between your windows, but they may also reveal distractions, especially if you have a bright wallpaper with varying colors. Turning the margin off will also give you a tiny bit more screen estate to work with.
Different Layouts Have Different Uses
The preset layouts underFill & Arrangehave different uses, depending on the work or activity you’re carrying out.
The maximize setting is a good upgrade for those of us who want a window to be as big as possible without losing the macOS menu bar. Its most useful with apps that use the full screen estate available to them, like a browser or text editor.
The “left/right halves” layout works well with a web browser, showing two portrait windows side-by-side. “Top/bottom halves” seems a bit less useful, but it could be effective when document editing.
The “four corners” arrangement is very useful for Finder or Terminal windows. Such windows can afford to be quite small, but these apps benefit from having many available at once.
