Moom Helps You Control The Messy Windows on Mac

Every computer user is used to dealing with windows—finding them, losing them, resizing them over and over. But have you ever considered that windows could not only be less annoying, but also just do more?

When the next version of macOS arrives this fall, it will bring a bunch of neat “window” tiling features which will make using your computer way easier, and less annoying. These new tiling and auto-snapping features might be newly built-in to the Mac, but they are old news to users of Microsoft’s Windows, and Mac users have enjoyed third-party apps like Many Tricks’ Moom for years. But with Sequoia’s new window tools, and a brand-new version of Moom now available, the Mac window scene is getting hot.

“Yes, if all you want is some basic window arranging functionality, you’ll be able to get it from Sequoia—but if you want customizability and functionality that goes way beyond what Apple will ever provide, […] Moom will deliver,” writes veteran Apple journalist Jason Snell on his Six Colors blog.

Automatic Window Tiling

Laptops are kind of a nightmare when it comes to wrangling open windows. There are tools to help. On the Mac, you can minimize windows to the Dock, or hide them with a keyboard shortcut (⌘-H). And over the years, Apple has tried many ways to get to grips with lots of windows on a smaller screen. Exposé, which gives you a zoomed-out overview of all your open windows even has a dedicated key on the top row of the Mac keyboard. But in real life, most of us are constantly shuffling windows around as we switch between documents and apps.

One answer to this is window tiling, which is just what it sounds like. Your windows are tiled so that they occupy the entire space of the screen, but with no overlapping. The only way to do this currently is to manually resize your windows and drag them into a neat grid. The Mac does already have a way to “tile” a window to the left or right half of the display, but you probably don’t already know that because it’s well hidden—you have to hover over the green window button with your mouse to even see it exists.

Sequoia brings “automatic window tiling,” although it’s not, as we shall see in a moment, particularly automatic. It works like this: When you drag a window towards the side of the screen, a ghost rectangle shows up, occupying half the screen. If you drop the window onto this ghost, it snaps to the ghost’s size and location. The same is true if you drag a window towards a screen corner, only then the ghost window occupies one quarter of the screen.

In this way, it’s very easy to quickly drag and drop up to four windows into a perfectly-tiled grid on your screen. But there’s more. Lot’s more.

Move and Zoom

Moom (move and zoom) is one of several third-party window managers for the Mac. Others include Rectangle and Magnet. These add way more options. For example, you can have arbitrary grids, instead of a maximum of four windows, or you can have rules that change the layouts depending on whether or not you have a large external monitor plugged in. Moom 4’s best new feature might be the aforementioned “hover mode,” which lets you move or resize a window without clicking on it, just by holding down a keyboard shortcut and moving the mouse.

And if you use a more progressive operating system like Linux, the possibilities might blow your mind. In Linux, there are entire desktop environments which are dedicated to tiling, and they really are automatic. For example, if you have three apps open, one using half the screen, the other two each occupying a quarter, and you launch another app, the existing windows move to accommodate it. It’s weird, because you can’t drag those windows like you’re used to, but on the other hand, there’s never any wasted space.

So should you dig into these tools? You totally should, especially on Windows, where Snap already exists, or in macOS Sequoia when it ships later this year. You might also check out the Mac’s existing attempts to make windows easier, like Exposé, or Stage Manager. But in the end, Apple’s automatic window tiling might be just another dead end.

“The UI in macOS is already finished. This kind of stuff is just fiddling,” UI designer Graham Bower told Lifewire via email. “Overlapping windows is a feature of the Mac desktop, not a problem. You can drag things between windows, while also having the windows large. Click on the edge of one and it comes to the front. Perfect.”

Maybe this problem is already solved, but going by its repeated attempts over the years to make windows easier to manage, it seems like Apple doesn’t agree. The good news is, there are now plenty of alternatives to try out, to see what fits you.