Lev Lazinskiy

Tile Windows in Mac OS X with Spectacle

One of my favorite features of Windows, and a couple Linux Window managers like openbox and awesome is the ability to tile windows. This is also a feature that I feel is missing in OS X by default. I think the OS X window manager is pretty good, and if you are working on an 11″ Macbook Air you are not likely going to be looking at two windows side by side. In this case, I prefer the approach of making apps fullscreen and being able to quickly switch between then using gestures. In the cases where I am plugged into my main 1920×1080 monitor I would prefer to look at windows side by side. This is why I was really excited to learn about Spectacle which is an application for OS X that allows you to tile your windows in a similar fashion as the above mentioned window manager. Spectacle is easy to use, gets out of your way, an is open source and free to use! All of these things make it an awesome application and I highly recommend that you give it a try if you are using OS X and miss the tiling features of some other desktop environments. These are the main configurations that you are able to get with Spectacle with a few keystrokes. There is support for custom shortcuts and other customization options.

The only feature that I wish that Spectacle had was the ability to dynamically configure orientations like Awesome allows you to do. Luckily being an open source project, once I get some time I will try to develop this feature and hopefully get it included in the main code.