Slant community chat on DiscourseWindow managers help manipulate application windows in order to increase productivity.
A good window manager for Mac will allow moving, resizing and rearranging application windows quickly. It will allow customizing how windows are handled, have keyboard shortcuts for performing window manipulations quickly and allow snapping windows to various locations on the desktop with the mouse.
Pro Custom Snap Areas
With this feature, you can move any window into the desired position, select 'advanced: create a custom snap area (using current window as template)' from the toolbar and also edit settings for the snap area. It is also possible to edit the size, position, and presentation of the drop-zone,
Con Costs
BetterSnapTool is no longer free and now costs $3.
Pro Save window position and size
Users can set window position and size themselves, allowing for a great way to set up a tiling window experience.
Con UI for settings can be confusing
The settings for the app are pretty jumbled and are hard to get a grip of, especially for first time users. While all the settings one would need are there, they are difficult to find or understand, which requires a good bit of playing around with the settings in order to get a feel for them and w...
Con Costs
Moom is not free: it costs $9.99.
Pro Easy to configure
ShiftIt is configured through a simple UI where you simply press the hotkeys you wish to map to a certain action.
Con Doesn't support moving windows between workspaces
There's no way to move a window to a different workspace with hotkeys in ShiftIt.
Pro Extremely configurable
Slate is similar to Linux WMs like Xmonad in that it is nearly infinitely configurable. You can either use the default configuration file or just Javascript for very complex/dynamic settings. Slate also offers editing a ".js" or a ".slate" file for configuration.
Pro Based on hotkeys
Hotkeys can be set to re-size and focus windows, as well as activate layout presets.
Con Project maintainance is on pause
The developer is currently taking a pause to focus on other things as of December 2015.
Con Hard to configure
There's no graphical user interface for configuring Slate, meaning it has to be done from the command line interface or by editing a config file. This makes it somewhat difficult and time-consuming.
Pro Requires no configuration and is very easy to use
The user simply needs to install Divvy and they can immediately start organizing their windows with no setup time or learning curve involved.
Pro Reasonably configurable
You can change the grid dimensions and other visual settings to suit your needs.
Con Missing snap to borders
There is no way to snap to border as in Windows, though there is a way to set keyboard shortcuts to throw windows to the sides or top/bottom of the screen.
Con Expensive at $13.99
Divvy is one of the more (if not most) expensive window managers.
Pro Low footprint
Spectacle only uses up 18-19 MB of RAM, which means there is not much overhead by using this app.
Pro Free and open source
Spectacle is licensed under MIT with source code available on GitHub.
Con Impossible to add new functions
While keyboard shortcuts can be changed for the available actions, there is no way to add custom actions which in turn limits the functionality of the app.
Con Limited window sizing capabilities
You can use 1/2 of the screen vertically and horizontally (divide into 4 parts). You can also use the screen in thirds too, but only the left and right third: you can't use the 1/3 in the center. There is no way to do a more granular distribution.
Pro It's slick, quick, and does the trick…
Mosaic is probably the best window manager I have ever used for Mac. There are so many options available, you're sure to be able to set it up to suit your workflow… and the Mosaic Remote app gives Touchbar like control, without a Touchbar!
Pro Stays out of the way
While still allowing for insane customization.
Pro Intuitive handling
Just drag the window to one of the sides of the screen and it snaps there. This is especially useful for those who can't be bothered remembering the shortcuts.
Con Can't hide the menu bar icon
It would've been nice to be able to hide the icon so it doesn't clutter the menu bar.
Con Limited availability
Magnet is only available in App Store.
Pro Good Adobe support
Gridsutra has Adobe support with the ability of stacking Adobe windows.
Pro Window arrangement with a single click
Windows can be arranged or snapped in Gridsutra with a single click.
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Pro Free and open source
Osxmonad is licensed under BSD-3 with source code available on GitHub.
Pro Detects other windows
Sticker can detect edges of other windows so you can choose to stick your window to a part of a screen without overlapping others (or not).
Pro Highly intuitive
Drag a window to a part of the screen and tell it to fill an area. It's as simple as that.
Pro Recently updated and rewritten in Swift.
The application was written in Objective-C, but was recently updated and completely rewritten in Apple's new native language Swift.
Pro It's free and open-source
Amethyst is published under the MIT license making it open-source and id offered completely free. This allows anyone to give the tiling window manger a try, which is great.
Con There are more user friendly window managers available
There are certainly more user friendly window managers available for MacOS, such as Divvy or Moom. Amethyst, however, is more powerful and customizable than the more user friendly options available and therefore may be a better choice for a user looking for more advanced capabilities and customiza...
Pro Supports multiple monitors / spaces
Windows can be sent to different monitors and spaces. It can also be aligned as needed.
Pro Keyboard centric
SizeUp has user-configurable keyboard shortcuts for a set of pre-defined actions.
Con No on-the-fly split screen window settings
Unlike some other tiling window managers, SizeUp has no way to change the size of split screen actions on-the-fly. Any time a user wants to change how much room on the screen a window takes up when using the split screen function, they will need to manually change the settings, which can be time c...
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Pro Works in the same way that Xmonad & i3 does for Linux
For those who would like the same tiling window management of Xmonad and i3.
Pro Highly configurable
Using the config file (kwmrc) you can configure a variety of options including Window spacing and padding, borders, hot-key commands, etc... There are those who would say that the possibilities are limitless.
Con No longer being developed.
Sadly the developer has moved on to work on a different project (Chunkwm), so there will be no more updates for KWM. However the code works well; no matter what version of Mac OS X you are using.
Con Takes long to set up
You need to use the terminal and edit the configuration file in order to adjust it to the way you want. This might be a little confusing for basic users. But once you have it set, you can just copy the config file and use it on a multiple amount of machines.
Pro Scroll up/down to change size
Simply scroll up or down on the menu bar to make size alterations.
Con Not under active development
Hyperdock doesn't seem to be under active development and hasn't been updated since october 2014.
Pro Simplicity
In Breeze, the user can very quickly assign pre-set window positions to hot-keys, although there are not many advanced hot-key options.
Pro Ease of use
The following are number of benefits of using Breeze: It's super simple to setup. It focuses on basic window management. It works with Spaces. "Nag" mode cab be used indefinitely.
Con No Adobe CC support
Adobe CC products do not respond to Breeze.
Pro Simple and cheap
DoublePane is a low cost solution for basic window snapping similar to that on Windows7.
Know any negative aspects of this option?
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