Mastering Window Tiling and Resizing Keyboard Shortcuts

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using keyboard shortcuts to tile and resize windows on your Mac. So when you manipulate windows on your Mac, you can make them fill the maximum amount of space on the screen, you can tile them to the left or right, you can center them and do other things. There are a lot of keyboard shortcuts associated with those actions. But since window tiling is fairly new, you're probably not as used to the keyboard shortcuts as you are with the standards like Command-C for copy and Command-Q for quit. So for instance, here I've got two windows, a Finder window and a Notes window. And I can manipulate these in a variety of ways using, say, the corners or the sides of these to resize them. I could click and drag from the top to move them around. But if I want to manipulate these to perfectly fit or center them, then I'm going to want to go to the Window menu here. And there are a variety of commands like Fill, Center, and then a whole submenu of things under Move and Resize. You'll notice that a lot of keyboard shortcuts associated with these. So let's go through them. Learning just a few could really help increase your productivity. So for instance, if I wanted this window here to be as large as it could possibly be, then I may want to use Window and then Fill. Notice the keyboard shortcut for that is Control-Globe-F. Now, if you don't have a Globe key on your Mac's keyboard, note that the Globe key replaces the Fn key. As a matter of fact, on newer Mac keyboards, you'll find both the Globe and the letters Fn on that key. But if you have an older Mac, it might just be Fn. And that's fine. It'll work just the same. So instead of using this menu item here, I can use Control and then Globe and then F. And it will take this window and move all of the corners and sides to maximize its size to fit across the entire screen. Let's switch to this Documents window here. I could do the same thing with this one here using the same Control and then Globe and F key. And it now fills the entire screen. Note that this is different than going to full screen view because this window here is still on the same desktop space as the other windows like the Notes window behind it. So they are still just regular windows on a single desktop. If I switch to Mission Control here, you can see I just have the one desktop and I just have those two windows on it. However, if I were to click the green button here or use View and then enter full screen, then this window, in this case, the Documents window, is now a separate space. I have a desktop space that can have one or more windows on it. And I have this full screen view of the Finder with no desktop behind it. It's just the window by itself. So it's a big difference between having a full screen version of that window and having windows that are simply maximized to fill from edge to edge the entire desktop. Now there's another command that's also similar but not the same as Fill and that's Zoom. If I choose Zoom here from the window menu, look at what happens. You can see the window did get bigger but it didn't actually fill the screen and it didn't create its own space either. It simply got a little taller and a little wider. Look what happens if I were to shrink it down to here and say Zoom. And look what happens if I were to actually expand the window and then Zoom. It actually shrinks in that case. What Zoom does is it makes the window as large as it needs to be to include all the information. So in this case, on a Finder window, I've got these columns here and that's all the space that's needed. If I add some extra space, it's just wasted space here. And the same is true for other apps. For instance, in Pages here, if I Zoom, you can see it actually shrinks but it shrinks so that the page is taking up the exact amount of space it needs. There's no extra space here at all. So Zooming gets the window to be the perfect size. Fill takes the window to the maximum size and Full Screen will move it to a separate space, taking over the entire space with no desktop behind it. Now also notice what happens when I Fill with the Documents window here and then I go to drag it again. It shrinks back to the previous size. When you use a command like Fill, it remembers the previous size in case you want to go back to it. And in fact, there is a command and a cable shortcut for that. If you go to Move and Resize, the bottom item here is Ctrl-Globe-R for Return to Previous Size. So if I use Ctrl-Globe-F to make it the maximum size, I can use Ctrl-Globe-R and return to the previous size. And as you saw, the same thing happens when you simply start dragging the window. Now there's another command here, Center. This doesn't actually change the size of the window at all, but it will center it perfectly on the screen, something I know a lot of people want. So with this Finder window definitely off-center, I can use Ctrl-Globe and then C and you can see how it centers it. Now in some cases, it does actually resize the window and that's because it also acts as a way to return to the previous size. If I were to use Ctrl-Globe and then F for Fill, Ctrl-Globe and C for Center, it both centers it and returns it to its previous size. If you find these videos valuable, consider joining the more than 2,000 others that support MacMost through Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com slash patreon. So now let's take a look at the things underneath the Move and Resize sub-menu. So you've got Left, Right, Top, and Bottom and there's four keyboard shortcuts here to memorize, except there's not really four, it's just one. Using the same Ctrl and Globe modifier keys that we've been using for F, C, and R, we just have to remember to use the arrow keys and use them in a way that makes sense. For instance, the left arrow key moves the window to the left half of the screen. So with this Documents window selected here, I could do Fn, Ctrl, and then the left arrow and it will make this window be the left half. I could do the right arrow for the right half, up arrow for the top half, and the down arrow for the bottom half. And then it still remembers the original size when I go back to drag it or use Ctrl-Globe and R. So I could do that with that window and then select the Notes window here and then move this to the right side with Ctrl-Globe and the right arrow. And that way I can split the screen. But I could also do that with one single command, because under Window, Move and Resize, there's also a bunch of Arrange commands here. Now these are the same as halves, except you're adding the Shift key. So if I were to use Ctrl-Globe and Shift and then the left arrow, it'll move this to the left side. But it does more than just affect the topmost window. It actually looks to see what the next window is underneath it. In this case it will be Notes, and it will move that to the opposite side, so the right half. So with one keyboard shortcut, Ctrl-Globe, Shift, and the left arrow, I've moved the top two windows to be the left and right halves. If I did the right arrow, it will do them but in the opposite halves, like that. Now there's some hidden shortcuts here. Under Arrange, if I hold the Option key down, notice I get left and quarters. And that means that the current window will be the left side, and the next two windows will be the top and bottom of the right side, or the other half here. So, for instance, let's open a second finder window here. I'll dig down into a folder, and I've got the Notes window being the topmost window, and these are the next two. So I'll do Globe and Ctrl and Shift and Option, and then left, and you can see how it puts the Notes window on the left side, and then these two in these quarters. If I do all the same keys but do the right arrow, it puts the Notes window, the topmost one on the right. I can do the down arrow, and you can see the Notes is now the bottom, and the others fill the other quarters. So if you want that kind of thing, you do have keyboard shortcuts for it by holding down the Option key as an extra modifier to change how these work. Now what about these other ones? Like if you want the four quarters here, for instance, there's a full set of customization options. If you go to System Settings, and then go down to Keyboard, and then click the Keyboard Shortcuts button here, and then go to Windows, then you're going to find a ton of options to customize. Under General here, you've got the Fill, Center, and Return to Previous Size commands. Under Halves, you've got the four halves, and you could customize those. Under Quarters, you could add them here. Under Arrange, you can customize these. Remember I told you that there is kind of a hidden button up here to maximize the window, and the secret is to double-click on the title bar. But if you do it with the default settings, it will do that zoom function that I was talking about earlier. So you can see here how the Finder window didn't maximize at all. It just went to the perfect size. However, if you go to System Settings, and then go to Desktop and Dock, and then look for Window Title Bar Double-Click Action, you can see it's set to Zoom by default, but you could change it to Fill. Now when you double-click somewhere else, maybe just consider the space to the right of the green button the place to do it. Notice it will now maximize. So now you have kind of a button to be able to do that. It's just a button all across the top wherever there isn't something else to click. Also note you can do most of this by just dragging the windows as well. If you go into System Settings, and then Desktop and Dock, go down to Windows, and you'll see drag windows to the left or right edge of the screen to tile. So this gets you the left or right half. Drag windows to the menu bar to fill, and hold the Option key while dragging to tile. So if I turn this off and just leave these top two on, I can take any window like this, and if I drag it to the right or left, you can see how it snaps to the half there. And then if I drag to the top, you can see how it will fill like that. Those are those options right there. If I do the Option key, that means I still can do that, but holding the Option key down will make it a little bit easier. I don't need to go all the way to the right or left side. And in fact, if I go far enough into a corner here, you'll see it changes to quarters. And also note that if you're getting large margins whenever you do window tiling, it's this last option here. Tiled windows have margins. If I turn that on, and I say move this to the right half, you can see how it's got a nice fat margin around the top, bottom, and right, or here the top, bottom, and left. So if you don't want that, turn off this option. So if you want to start using these keyboard shortcuts, think of the globe and control keys together as kind of the gateway to the keyboard shortcuts for window tiling. And then just remember F for fill, C for center, R for return, and then the four arrow keys to move the window to any half that you want. That will give you the basics. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.