How to tile windows on a Mac

macOS can tile windows on its own now. Here’s every built-in way to do it, the shortcuts and settings, and what to use when halves and quarters aren’t enough.

Checked against Apple’s Mac User Guide on October 18, 2026.

Tiling built into macOS

Apple added window tiling in macOS Sequoia (macOS 15, 2024), and it’s still there in later versions. If your Mac runs macOS 15 or later, you can tile without installing anything. Apple’s Tile windows on Mac guide lists these ways:

• Drag to an edge. Drag a window to the left or right edge of the screen to fill that half, or into a corner for a quarter. Drag it to the menu bar and it fills the desktop. (Keep going through the top edge and Mission Control opens instead.)
• Hold Option while dragging. Press Option as you drag and macOS highlights where the window will land before you reach the edge; release on the highlighted area.
• The green button. Hold the pointer over the green button in a window’s top-left corner to see tile layouts. Hold Option to see more.
• The Window menu. Window › Move & Resize has halves, quarters and arrangements for several windows, plus Fill and Center.

Keyboard shortcuts

Apple’s tiling shortcuts use Fn and Control:

Turning tiling on or off

Open System Settings › Desktop & Dock and scroll to Windows. Apple lists four switches there: “Drag windows to left or right edge of screen to tile”, “Drag windows to menu bar to fill screen”, “Hold ⌥ key while dragging windows to tile”, and “Tiled windows have margins” (Change window tiling settings). If tiling gets in the way of a window manager you’ve installed, turning off the first one usually stops the two from fighting over the same drag.

Where built-in tiling stops

macOS tiles to halves, quarters and full screen. That covers a lot. What it doesn’t do:

• Uneven layouts. There’s no built-in two-thirds and one-third, or a wide center column with narrow sides.
• Your own zones. You can’t draw a layout once and keep reusing it.
• Different layouts per display. A portrait monitor and a wide monitor want different arrangements; our guide to setting up a vertical monitor on a Mac covers rotation and stacked rows.

Tiling arranges windows; it doesn’t clear them away. To sweep everything aside for a moment, use the show desktop shortcut on Mac (Fn-H) instead.

If your Mac is on macOS 13 or 14, there’s no edge tiling at all; you have Split View and third-party apps.

Other built-in options: Split View and Stage Manager

Split View puts two apps side by side in their own full-screen space; see how to split screen on a Mac for the steps. Stage Manager keeps the app you’re using in the center and lines the rest up on the side, which suits switching more than side-by-side work; here’s how to use Stage Manager on a Mac, or turn it off. Want one app to take the whole display? See how to go full screen on a Mac, and when Fill is the better pick.

Keyboard snapping apps

Apps like Rectangle (free) and Magnet snap the active window to halves, thirds and quarters with shortcuts, on older macOS versions too. If equal regions are all you need, they’re quick and dependable; see our honest Rectangle and Magnet comparisons, or the head-to-head Rectangle vs Magnet. For grid-based resizing, Divvy and its alternatives let you pick a window’s size on a grid, and Moom and its alternatives add saved layouts you can restore in one step. If you still have Spectacle installed, it’s discontinued; here’s what replaced Spectacle.

Tiling window managers: yabai, AeroSpace, Amethyst

If “tiling” to you means windows arranging themselves automatically as you open them, the way i3 or xmonad do on Linux, you want a tiling window manager. Three free, open-source (MIT-licensed) ones dominate on the Mac. From each project’s own GitHub README, checked October 21, 2026:

• yabai tiles automatically using binary space partitioning and is controlled from a command line; keyboard shortcuts come from a separate tool such as skhd. It supports macOS 11 or 12 and later (depending on Intel or Apple silicon) through Tahoe 26, and needs “Displays have separate Spaces” turned on. Some advanced features need System Integrity Protection partly disabled; that’s optional. Latest release: v7.1.25 (May 2026).
• AeroSpace is an i3-like tiling manager built on a tree of windows, with its own virtual workspaces instead of macOS Spaces, a plain-text config file and a CLI. Its README stresses that it doesn’t require disabling SIP. It isn’t notarized by Apple; the recommended install is Homebrew.
• Amethyst is “along the lines of xmonad”: it lays windows out in layouts you cycle through with keyboard shortcuts (Option-Shift-Space by default) and resize with a main pane. It needs macOS 10.15 or later, installs from its releases page or Homebrew, and its latest release is v0.24.3 (April 2026).

All three are excellent if you live on the keyboard and want the computer to decide where each window goes. The trade-off is setup: config files, shortcuts to learn, and permissions or settings to adjust. Screen Divider is the opposite approach: nothing moves until you drag it, and the layout is one you drew yourself. Plenty of people are happiest with one or the other; it comes down to whether you want automatic or manual tiling. For a side-by-side of config, Spaces and SIP, see yabai vs AeroSpace vs Amethyst.

Custom zones with Screen Divider

When halves and quarters don’t fit how you work, a zone-based tool does. In Screen Divider you split the screen in a visual editor as finely as you like, then merge any rectangle of cells into a single zone, like a big main area on top with two panels underneath:

• Install it and grant Accessibility access when macOS asks (every window manager needs this).
• Open the layout editor from the menu bar, split the screen and merge cells into zones.
• Drag any window toward a zone and let go. It snaps in and resizes to fill it.

Each display keeps its own layout, and it runs on macOS 13 Ventura or later, so it also covers Macs that don’t have Sequoia’s tiling. For more ways to arrange windows, see how to snap windows on a Mac. Switching from a Windows PC where you used PowerToys? Our FancyZones for Mac guide shows how to rebuild those zone layouts.

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