Ta ke control of your windows

Discover techniques to tame your workspace, including Sierra’s new tricks

Discover Sierra’s window management tricks

How often do you find yourself dragging a window to roughly the place you want it to fill, and then dragging from a couple of its edges to make it the size you want?

Sadly, macOS doesn’t have an equivalent to Microsoft’s Window Snap tech to enable you to quickly make a window fill the left or right half of the desktop. However, it has some hidden shortcuts that are more powerful.

In these two pages you’ll learn techniques that will help you to wrangle windows more efficiently, so you can quickly get on with more pressing tasks. If you’re wondering why you haven’t found these shortcuts already, it’s because they’re the sort of hidden features that require someone to tell you about, or highly insightful experimentation on your part.

Some of the shortcuts you’ll learn about on these two pages have been part of the Mac operating system for years, so you can benefit from them even if you have no choice but to run an old version. For example, OS X Lion was the first version to enable resizing from any window edge or corner, which you can combine with holding one or two modifier keys to resize a window in two directions at once, for example.

If your Mac is running Sierra, though, you can enjoy additional enhancements Apple has added in this iteration. The great news here, especially if you’ve switched from a Windows PC, is that there’s at last an equivalent to the Maximize command found in Microsoft’s operating system, so you can make a window fill the desktop with a double-click. Related to that, you can instantly snap a window’s edge or corner to the same position of the overall desktop – no cumbersome dragging required!

If you need even more control

Earlier, we mentioned Windows Snap. After reading these pages, you may find yourself pining for something more like it, especially if you’ve recently switched from a PC. One of the following third-party tools will help you out.

The simpler option is Magnet (£3.99, Mac App Store) . It enables you to drag a window or press a key combo to make the window fill a specific quarter or half of the desktop, or even the whole screen. Your more powerful option is Moom (£7.99, Mac App Store). A highlight is its ability to save and restore window layouts in an instant by pressing a keyboard shortcut. For now, though, let’s look at what comes free with your Mac.

At last, macOS has a simple way to make a window fill the entire desktop