Why does Apple refuse to add window snapping to macOS?

Well, because it has?

Hover over the green stoplight, you get a popover with fullscreen options.

Press Option and the fullscreen options mutate into snap left/snap right/zoom.

These can also be found in the Window menu. Again, press option to mutate the fullscreen ones to snap.

And since these are menu options, one can set any keyboard shortcut of their choosing through the keyboard shortcut prefpane+.

So it is not "snapping" in the sense that you drag the window to the left or right side of the screen, and I would 200% agree that it is completely non-obvious to discover, but it is there for any one to peruse without any third party tool.

+ See here for how to achieve that, section "Tiling and snapping" (along with more things to make first party things more sane for a certain crowd) https://lna7n.org/2021/04/16/a-survival-guide-to-macos-from-...

I always feel like Apple must have some grand 1000IQ concept for window management and I just don't get it. Stage Manager, Spaces, Mission Control, Expose, Window Zooming, Hiding, Minimizing (which is different from Hiding), Fullscreen/Splitscreen... yet the first thing I do is install a third-party window manager.

I tried for months to go vanilla and get my head around the features. But why, why do fullscreen windows create their own space when I want them to exist within a space? Why can't I briefly bring up Finder on top of my fullscreen window? Why are there lengthy animations to switch between spaces? Why do CMD+Tab and CMD+` have a million special rules for which windows they select? Why is there no way perfectly position more than two apps next to each other? Why are apps in splitscreen married to each other? Why can't I easily swap one of them? Why are some window operations keyboard-exclusive, while others can only be performed with the mouse?

There has got to be a perfect workflow where all this makes sense. Otherwise, they wouldn't build it like that? Right?

My go to example to explain the One True Mac Way of Window management is the “The many windows of John Siracusa” podcast from ATP a few years ago.

The relevant discussion starts at 1:33:00

https://atp.fm/episodes/96

Siracusa, who grew up as a (classic) Mac user, explains his tiling and overlapping habits to Arment and Liss, who grew up as Microsoft Windows users and later switched, and they gasp in utter horror, shock and awe.

For example Siracusa explains that he currently has a dozen terminal windows open, and also 19 overlapping Safari windows, normal for him, in BBEdit he regularly hits 20-40; they ask him if he doesn’t know about tabs and he replies “Oh, I love tabs! Of course every Window has many tabs!”. How would he manage/organize hundreds of tabs in multiple applications with a snapping tiling manager? He can’t. It is fun from there. Like, he jokes after a work week his desktop has “sedimentary layers”.

What about that interminable animation every time you fullscreen a window or switch between fullscreen windows? It should be at least twice as fast and there's not even any way to hack it to speed it up. You just have to live with it. ("reduce motion" changes it to a crossfade but doesn't make it faster)

While we're at it, the Dock has always been bad. And the top menu bar was good for the original Macintosh with a tiny screen but it makes no sense on a 4k display with many different app windows showing simultaneously. MacOS has a lot of relics of the past that Apple refuses to give up. I just see it as a tax I have to pay to get to use Apple Silicon.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US6661436B2/en Method for providing window snap control for a split screen computer program GUI

https://patents.justia.com/patent/6661436

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250201392

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/07/gnome-shell-quarter-tili...

Mac user since 1987, Lisa user before.

Mac windows do snap together when they're close to each other or the edge of the screen.

You can option double-click any corner to make the window fill the screen without going into fullscreen mode.

You can double-click any edge or corner to make it expand to the edge.

Hold down option and mouse over the green traffic light, and you get the option to fill the left or right half of the screen.

The main issues for me are:

1. changing monitor configurations destroys my arrangement

2. the menu bar, on large screens, is too far away — it needs to be closer to where I'm actively working

Can an Ask HN self-post be clickbait? Apple isn’t refusing to do anything. They just haven’t done some minor thing that you personally would like. The fact that you’re “shocked” by something as banal as “lack of window snapping” is kind of funny actually.

Just use Rectangle app https://rectangleapp.com/

I use Magnet which is sweet. https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/

More importantly: Why have users collectively mostly forgotten that software is something you can change?

If I sound like a smug Linux user here, damn right. This is a stupid way to do operating systems.

From my relatively short experience but ongoing with Mac, MacOS lacks a lot of features that Windows has. It has many inferior options that people just accept. Some people find third party software or modifying plists to bend the operating system to their will.

As much as I hate many many many design choices in Apple's ecosystems, I adjust where I can and move on.

I really wish there was an i3-like tiling window manager for macOS. Yes, I'm aware of Yabai and others, but it's still not quite the same. Tiling apps bolted onto macOS's floating windows still feel sluggish, window decorations take up lots of space and are easy to accidentally click on (ruining the tiling), animations are annoying, focus doesn't follow mouse, keyboard shortcuts sometimes conflict, and so on.

This appears every now and then on HN.

Window management in macOS is superficially similar but profoundly different from Windows or most Linux DEs. It's got a fixed menu bar which windows are independent from. That alone already changes a lot and has deep implications.

My advice is to learn how and why it's different instead of trying to make it behave as something it's not. Waiting for Apple to turn it into a chimera would be even worse, IMO.

I think this comes down to Apple's envisaged window management paradigm being centered around full-screen windows.

In Apple's UX view, it seems like you're meant to maximize windows to "spaces", and switch between workspaces using a few gestures (4 finger swipes mainly) to reveal all windows, and swap between workspaces that way.

Rectangle, as others have pointed out, give you the "snap" experience you would expect from other OSs.

I think the Apple Vision Pro is a good example of why snapping makes no sense.

In this environment, your screen is basically the entire world around you, it can be as big as you want. Would you want to divide this into neat rectangles filling your entire view ? If your screen is that large, you basically size your windows to fit the content and then arrange them spatially into something that makes sense to you.

The desktop isn’t that different, but it’s limited by the size of your screen. This urge to divide the entirety of your screen up into rectangles with zero breathing room between them is not because that’s the most natural way of organizing your windows, it’s a way to deal with lack of space.

Say you’re organizing your mail on your physical desk. You’re making different stacks. Bills, taxes, junkmail, etc. Are you going to put these stacks right next to each other ? No, you’re going to leave some room between them. In fact, it would be really annoying if you had so many different stacks of papers on your desk that you had to put them next to each other filling the entire surface. It would feel way more chaotic.

In my opinion, tools like a maximize button and window snapping are trying to solve the wrong problem. You’re trying to maximize usage of the space you have, because you have too little. The real solution is to get more space, i.e. get a larger monitor. You don’t need window snapping or anything like that if your monitor is big enough, and you can just size your windows to fit the size of their content and place them wherever. In fact, on a large monitor window snapping makes zero sense.

This does seem like a personal preference. I quite like MacOS window management, and I hate Windows window management.

Like everything Apple, it has an opinion. You either like the opinion or you don't... I feel that MacOS's UI paradigm revolves around extra large monitors and showing your screen as a sort of desk. A lot of wasted/empty space where you arrange things freely, as opposed to Windows/Linux which emphasize efficiency in using the screen real estate.

I use MacOS daily at work but I would LOVE if I could use Windows instead, that's what I have on my personal machine. It looks like the OP simply wants to use Microsoft and can't admit it to themselves!

I just installed Rectangle and forgot about it, never had a single problem with it.

I don't miss it. I carefully dragged each window to align just right one time, and never had to redo it since. It persists across reboots, and remembers placements separately for the two monitor arrangements I use (laptop, laptop + big monitor) so I only had to do the fiddly work once.

Just use Magnet https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magnet/id441258766?mt=12

I’m still sad about the spaces grid that’s been removed in recent versions from macOS. Som 15 years ago when I started using a MacBook unibody 13” there were grid like spaces. I usually had a 3-by-3 grid. IDE in the center, left a browser window for docs, right a browser window for preview of what I was building, bottom terminal, bottom right spotify, top right socials, and some leftovers on top and bottom left. Every app had it’s own designated space.

Now, I’m using 9 spaces, lineair unfortunately. But I’m using yabai with shkd as window manager and Alt-tab to switch between recent windows (as that’s apparently broken by design in macOS).

I’ve configured so called “modes” for create a vim-command-like way of commanding windows and focus around. Eg hyper+m goes into _m_ove mode, from there I can press 1-9 to move a window to a specific space, or shift+1-9 to move and follow, or (shift+)q to move (and follow) a window to the latest focused space. (Hyper+q in “normal” mode moves me back and forth between recent spaces.) I’ve got jump mode to go to an application by shortcut, and some app specific modes to bind key successions to shortcuts.

Oh, not trivial, hyper+enter gives me iTerm at any space

The nice thing about yabai with SIP disabled is that it’s snapping without _any_ delay, which is great when working with many windows.

Personally, I use Swish for this [1], but the reason is probably because of the intended audience. Window snapping requires you to organize your windows yourself, which is something they clearly don't want you to do. That's why Mission Control, App Exposé, Stage Manager, and (arguably) Launchpad exist—they organize your windows for you.

[1]: https://highlyopinionated.co/swish/

I think with macOS’s design of the dock (resizable, unlike on Windows where the task bar always takes up the whole monitor width,) having one or more windows “full screen” on your desktop feels wrong. There is always some some space left unoccupied to the side of the dock.

Apple has a solution for this which is the green dot that puts your app in a separate space to be truly full screen, and you can split screen between two apps. I guess that’s what Apple would like you to do instead of snapping.

I use Rectangle for this. Works like a charm. https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle

It’s probably like how their Health app sucks to use directly: they figure people will solve it with apps, and people have done that. There are competing solutions available that are all pretty good.

And now that there are so many solutions it might make less sense to then integrate one which will practically kill the rest.

I personally use an app Divvy which let me create global hot keys for specific arrangements and moved on.

I always turn off most snapping. Why? Because I have my preferred layout already, and have good dexterity to move things.

When I drag a title bar to the top center, as I have for decades, it tries to maximize the window. I never want that, and have double-click titlebar (that’s more efficient) if I do.

There’s also a weird state machine between snap to size and normal mode I never completely understood. Believe the thinking is that it should work the same as max/restore but I don’t want three modes to keep track of. If I do snap the size/position that’s what I want, and would never want it to go back to the old place, aka restore.

I think KDE has some useful subset that can be configured. The edge snapping is not bad, and the ones that require a modifier key.

These are implementation concerns however. The basic idea is good but I haven’t seen it done right by default yet.

I use an app called Cinch but there are a few third party apps that do it. I wish I could run GNOME on my macOS

I have been using spectacle app since a long time and I love it. It lets you define keyboard shortcuts to make it easy to size and move windows around. Here is the website https://www.spectacleapp.com/

Possibly patents. As an example that may or may not be relevant, Google surfaced https://patents.google.com/patent/US10592080B2/en for me. It’s from “Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC” and says

“This document describes techniques and apparatuses enabling assisted presentation of application windows in a multi-application environment. The multi-application environment described herein presents one or more application windows, which can be sized, positioned, or layered to provide an optimized layout. In some embodiments, these techniques and apparatuses enable a size or position of an application window to be determined based on an edge of another application window.”

It’s unfortunate that non-Linux desktop environments don’t have a nice keyboard autotiler like Pop Shell. Amethyst and MacOS in general feel so unintuitive and needlessly complex/feature lacking that I’m surprised it has captured the kind of audience that Apple is known for having.

Same reason why Mac mouse doesn’t have right click and why ~double-click~ [edit: pressing “return”] on a folder is renaming, and why window controls are on a left side of a window and do things unlike MS Windows (not closing, not minimizing, not maximizing). Patents.

I think this is more about the ethos of the Mac. Unix (which is the underpinnings of Mac) was all about lots of small tools that build together to make something great, and if the base OS doesn’t have what you want then that’s a great third party (or DIY) opportunity.

This bleeds over to the Mac in my opinion. I don’t want Apple to make everything, I want them to provide hooks and APIs that allow other people to make things to give me more choices as a user.

I don’t want big monolith applications (like Outlook), I want small applications that do one thing well.

So when people say “why doesn’t Apple do X?” And I see a dozen third party implementations I think “because they don’t need to” and that’s perfect in my mind.

OSX / MacOS has always felt frustrating that way. There isn’t appreciation for making good use of desktop space. It favours littering windows of various sizes everywhere, and the Dock has always wanted to waste two rectangles of desktop on either side.

So sad that we need 3rd party apps for even the most basic functionality in mac os. It used to be that linux was a hassle to set up, and mac os worked out of the box. Now it's quite the opposite.

Similar thing with using an external 4k monitor. By default it's blurry (looks like 720p, awful), and one needs a 3rd party app (BetterDisplay) just to get a decent image. I had this issue with several macs and displays and cables. Terrible user experience. Obviously works out of the box with ubuntu, debian, and windows.

This is the first thing I install on any new Apple laptop. It Just Works™ https://rectangleapp.com/

When I was annoyed with this I went ahead and downloaded phoenix (https://github.com/kasper/phoenix) wrote a little javascript and now I have a bunch of globally accessable hotkeys so I can lay my windows out in a number of combinations. Right now I have setups for over/under left/right, two by two grid, and three by three grid.

I've got some plans to spend some time enabling more arbitrary grids and subgrids but I haven't gotten to it yet.

For those that want this for Mac, use this app called Rectangle. It's a MUST HAVE.

https://rectangleapp.com/

Does macOS have any tools for searching (fuzzy filtering) through open windows¹ these days?

I'm recently switching to Mac at work, and the last time I was in it one of the things I missed the most was that feature.

I'm also hoping commenters on this post will be writing about their favorite hacks for emulating tiling WMs on macOS.

--

1: Example, basically exactly the feature I want: https://youtu.be/urqkaWo5geQ

I assume because there are several great tools for handling this so it’s not really a priority.

If and when they do add one we can look forward to the many articles about “sherlocking” though so that’ll be fun.

Try BetterSnapTool.

As others have mentioned, this feature is patended. `BetterSnapTool` is $3 is for a lifetime license and does what you'd expect coming from XFCE/windows etc.

For the same reason they refuse to implement displayer multistream. And a gazillion other industry standards: because they can, and they feel that their way is the right way.

Can anyone also tell me how to get the dock on all my 4 monitors together? The best I can do is get it on the bottom 2 monitors using the mouse hover features.

But is there a way to get it to show on all 4 monitors all the time? If it could show the open windows on each monitor (like windows taskbar) that would be even more amazing! Please this has been bugging me for so long and any help is appreciated.

P.S. There is a software called ubar but that only works for bottom 2 monitors :/

Some form of ‘snap’ is being rolled out with Stage Manager on the iPad, which has very strong window rails, and the latest update improves their granularity. macOS has very few snap rails relative to the iPad, and only very limited close-range springs when in proximity to other windows. Perhaps that’ll change, or perhaps not, in the future. So, Apple’s definitely not ignoring snapping — they’re just doing it in ways that don’t currently meet your needs.

I think Stage Manager shows their hand—that they think users should manage this with the mouse, with no window-snapping.

All this said, I would like to see the full-screen mode get support for three windows, along with a way to stack vertically. There are times when you need more than two windows on a screen.

I also think it’s as simple (and stupid) as Apple wanting to continue to use rounded corners and window-snapping not really making rounded corners look particularly elegant.

Window snapping is patented by Microsoft.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US10592080B2/en

MS and apple have agreements to share patents though, so I don’t know why they couldn’t implement this.

Windows also struggles with moving windows between a 4K laptop and a 1080p display. The window chugs to reshape into the display resolution but the most bizarre is moving a window to 1080p then clicking maximize but it just to the 4K display in max resolution. I mean WTF is that? How the heck do you easily move the window between different resolutions with it doing the "right" thing, not the stupid thing?

ever since lion began the ipadification of macos, apple's Happy Path™ has been native full screen (even though it's an objective downgrade from the scuffed fullscreen mac apps of yore, since you have to sit through a swipe animation every time you cmd-tab)

you can split this; you just have to hold down the fullscreen button, no right-click access because again, thoughtless application of touchscreen idioms

as someone who uses none of the above: lining things up is painless since window bounds are slightly sticky, & macos remembers app state so it's not like you're doing manual window management every time you start up $APP. broadly equivalent in practice to a tiling wm with elaborate preset layouts & pigeonholes for specific programs. except you just drag things instead of editing a config file. couple this with all the apps i frequently use in full screen (iterm, mpv) having options for pre-lion-style instant-switch fullscreen, and i'm not hurting for lack of snapping... ever, really.

fwiw there are third-party solutions for snapping if you really care, and there are even full-blown x11-style tilers

Productivity-wise, Stage Manager is a step in the right direction in my opinion. I don't think that the macOS desktop environment needs a snapping/tiling window manager. Conceptually however, the best third-party window manager is spoonfish. But Rectangle suffices for certain tasks.

https://github.com/jcs/spoonfish

It’s shocking that you can’t tell MacOS which monitor to keep the app tray on (or to simply show it on all monitors), and that it constantly moves!

Even this is not answer to your question (others did it well), I love this hack for simple moving windows by clicking anywhere: https://mmazzarolo.com/blog/2022-04-16-drag-window-by-clicki...

Doesn't really answer your question but in case you didn't know, BetterTouchTool is a third party app that solves this problem.

I don’t think I can use macOS without rectangle.

Seems like you assume everyone likes window snapping because you do. It’s one of the most annoying aspects of using Windows for me.

They're still working on a catchy name for it so they can't release it yet.

I'm told "Snap Pro" is current front runner

There's a way to snap the window to one side or the other if you long press one of the resize buttons at the top. I'm a HS teacher and I often have my kids put two windows side by side. On the school-issued devices it's trivially simple, but it's honestly not that bad on a Mac. Just really unintuitive like everything else they do.

By "add" I assume you mean pre-install or include before it reaches me.

I think pre-installed stuff is a slippery slope with bloatware on one end of the spectrum, and a bare bones alpine version on the other end.

I don't mind installing stuff. My preference is minimalism. I prefer to have 3+ independent apps to choose from where possible.

They has enough with the groundbreaking announcement on wwdc of widgets in the desktop and Chrome... Sorry, "Web apps".

Maybe in 2025

I strongly recommend installing Spectacle for Mac, which does window snapping with a hotkey.

Apparently it's no longer maintained but works perfectly fine right now, and there are alternatives i haven't tried, like Rectangle.

Gary from the YouTube channel MacMost made some amazing eye opening guides regarding window management, like this one: https://youtu.be/T9uGNidrTyM

long time windows user that switched to mac due to Apple Silicon dominance on the laptop experience.

This, 1000x this.

It's utterly bizarre that the window management paradigm is "let 'em all stack up and make it easy to spread 'em all out"

At first I thought I didn't get the paradigm. Now I get that I don't get the idea behind the paradigm.

Rectangle (pro version) fixes some of this and adds some really cool features. And because of the Apple app hegemony, it does work nearly OS level good. But why, oh why does this have to be 3rd party?

It's like some any UX pattern baked in since Lisa?

Not quite answering your question directly, but I think it's important for platform owners to leave gaps for the developer ecosystem. This may be one that they have purposely left to the app market.

If Apple and Microsoft provided a solution to every UX variant people want, there wouldn't be a market for apps built on top of the platform for UX tools. The further they encroach on the various markets the more developers will be discouraged from entering those markets for fear of the platform making their app redundant.

Apple and Microsoft have to draw a line somewhere, sometimes they get it wrong though and piss off a load of devs.

There are however obvious counter arguments to this with platform default apps such as email. But again it's important for the "average user" to have those in any new device. The platform effectively needs to do roughly 90% of what the average user wants out of the box, but then encourage users to go purchase further solutions from the various markets. Window snapping probably sits in That second area.

UX when snapping to the right of the screen will suffer because the toolbar will forever be stuck to the top left of the screen. As such, I don’t believe this is a well optimised use case and might be why Apple doesn’t want to “emphasise” this particular use case.

Here’s my list of window management tools for Mac (and beyond): https://taoofmac.com/space/apps/window_managers

I've been happily using yabai for years - I even wrote some custom functions in hammerspoon to send windows to new spaces, move focus, and swap windows around n/s/e/w with key-bindings. Can't imagine life without it :shrug:

I remember when I brought a Windows laptop (it was my personal dev machine at the time) to an Apple interview, and the interviewee saw me organize my windows in a couple seconds to the sides and he was like "whoa, windows is neat".

"oh, uh. Yeah."

:)

I just discovered swish and it makes window management such a joy that it is unbelievable: https://highlyopinionated.co/swish/

Although it would be nice for this to be built into the OS, there are lots of apps that fulfill this purpose. I personally use Moom, have heard good things about Magnet, and if you like tiling there’s Yabai.

I find this utility very useful for working with windows on the Mac.

https://www.lightpillar.com/mosaic.html

Shoutout to SizeUp the first app I install on any MacOs computer I work on

Hold down the option key. Hover your mouse pointer over the green zoom button in the top-left corner of the window. A "move window to the left/right side of the screen" option appears.

I don't think Apple ever incorporated any feedback from their users. They have the culture of "our research based on user focus group found what's best for you".

MacOS has a very functional and intuitive window managing system. You use the mouse and resize windows and arrange them to your liking to suit your workflow and minimize wasted space.

tangential question: is there some sort of add-on tool-let that would duplicate the

    File-Edit-*-Windows-Help

menu down onto the top of an app's window? Even if it only worked when that window had focus would be good enough for me. I hate going to the top of the screen, only to discover the wrong app has focus

are there a family of little doo-dads like this, and what is the category called?

also, aside, pet peeve: why is New Window always in the File menu, and never in the Window menu, from time immemorial?

There are a few other recommendations for a non-native option - but my preferred one is Raycast. You get a launcher that does 100 other things plus hot key management of windows.

Mosiac. Works great: https://lightpillar.com/mosaic.html

Compared to Linux (Debian and Ubuntu) Apple's implementation is dysfunctional. Snapping and unsnapping is an important tool I now expect from any modern OS.

It may be basic, but what about the double clicking on sides of windows to make it expand, and double clicking on edges? Does does that not qualify as snapping?

It might be patented. You have to understand that a GUI design can only proceed with blessing from the legal dept in a company with assets that can be seized.

I don’t understand. I wouldn’t consider snapping a first class feature like closing, maximizing, and minimizing.

It’s possible that the addition of snapping would confuse some uninitiated users. They wouldn’t understand why the windows lock toward the side of the screen when they drag.

The only beef I have with apples windowing system is you can’t remove the finder from alt-tab. There are apps like witch but it is currently broken with IntelliJ tools. It doesn’t allow switch window focus to auto save.

I have written the developers about this. They probably are reading this now. Fix it.

Raycast does this really well, among other things

As with anything, there's always a third party app to fix what the trillion dollar companies can't.

Rectangle works just fine just a matter of time before getting sherlocked into macOS {mountain_range}

Probably for the same reason they won't support no-raise-on-focus or [sloppy-]focus-follows-mouse.

I’ve been using a Mac for ~20 years, I like it not snapping. The window goes where I want it go.

1)Because no one would care

2) there are applications which can add this

3) Mission Control is their preferred way to handle windows

I use Hammerspoon with the ShiftIt plugin ("spoon")

Works quite well, and is configured w/ Lua

    brew install rectangle

Why window buttons are on the top -left, that is the question?

BetterSnapTool! While at it, check out BetterTouchTool as well.

Raycast has some nice keyboard shortcuts for window layout.

It does have snapping?

This is easily solved by Magnet or Rectangle.

It's some patent thing.

Spectacle.app snaps

Might be a patent

Just use Yabai

What is "window snapping"?

It is hard for me to imagine what you could mean by "nonexistent window managing system". Obviously Mac OS has a window management system.

People have widely varying preferences when it comes to such things. You seem to be thinking of yours as though they are somehow objective and external to you.