Mac Window Management

fvwm might be basic, but it has a pile of features I wish I could have on a Mac. One of the features I've been missing is window tiling. A disorganized stack of windows just isn't my thing. For a while I was just hiding everything except one window, which worked, but was a bit excessive on a 2560x1600 pixel monitor. Thankfully there is a better way.

There are two external pieces of software that can help with the Tiling

Problem(tm). The first one I tried is SizeUp($13). It divides the screen into four quadrants (they default to 50% of the screen, but this can be customized) and then has key bindings to resize and move a window to fit any half or quarter of the screen. It can also do full screen. It's a very simple interface, and was easy to pick up. I also didn't find any bugs while using it.

The second piece of software I tried was Divvy($15). It divides the screen into cells (up to 10x10). You can then use the mouse to custom select a subset of the cells, which will resize the window to that portion of the screen. You can also define as many custom keyboard shortcuts as you want to correspond to any cell selection. With this you can define as many (possibly overlapping) screen regions as you want to have things snap to. It does have a bit more of a learning curve, and there is a questionable UI choice. Mainly that if you change how many cells the screen is divided into there isn't anyway to update existing shortcuts to use that grid. Instead you have to delete and re-create them. In practice this isn't a big deal however.

After using both pieces of software in demo mode for around a week and a half I broke down and bought Divvy, mostly due to greater flexibility. Now if only I could find something better than command-tab for switching between windows I'd be a very happy person indeed.

Thanks to Caleb for suggesting Divvy.