How do I simultaneously tile windows from different apps without minimising others first, e.g. I want to fill the screen with one of several open Excel windows and one of several open Preview windows tiled side by side?
toodeep wrote:
How do I simultaneously tile windows from different apps without minimising others first, e.g. I want to fill the screen with one of several open Excel windows and one of several open Preview windows tiled side by side?
Press and hold the green button, and choose Full Screen->Left of Screen.
The current window will tile to the left of the screen and all available windows will be displayed on the right for you to choose.
Note: just like when you put an application in full screen, these two half screen windows will get their own Space. Other windows are NOT minimized, they just remain in their Space, and you can go there using for example control-left or control-right.
toodeep wrote:
How do I simultaneously tile windows from different apps without minimising others first, e.g. I want to fill the screen with one of several open Excel windows and one of several open Preview windows tiled side by side?
Press and hold the green button, and choose Full Screen->Left of Screen.
The current window will tile to the left of the screen and all available windows will be displayed on the right for you to choose.
Note: just like when you put an application in full screen, these two half screen windows will get their own Space. Other windows are NOT minimized, they just remain in their Space, and you can go there using for example control-left or control-right.
'Appreciate your experimentation. When I invoke Full Screen left or right the resulting window width varies according to app, it seems. If the window extends over the display midline then no other windows are made available to tile. However, if the first window only occupies half the display then tiling proceeds. As a result Safari won't tile (without adjusting display resolution) but Excel does, for instance.
There is another possible reason why you are seeing "No available windows".
The windows offered in this instance are only the ones that exist in the same Space.
So if you have ten windows in Space 1, and only one window in Space 2, then by trying to tile the sole window in Space 2 will produce this; but trying to tile any of the windows in Space 1 will offer the other 9.
toodeep wrote:
How do I simultaneously tile windows from different apps without minimising others first, e.g. I want to fill the screen with one of several open Excel windows and one of several open Preview windows tiled side by side?
you can review the limits of Tiling, ref:
Change window tiling settings on Mac
Mac window tiling icons & keyboard shortcuts
Thanks too, but alas that behaviour is also screen resolution dependant. Invoking that on my MacBook Pro typically results in a 'No Available Windows' message on the other screen half, even when there are plenty of available windows. Seemingly macOS operates a dynamic minimum window width that interferes with tiling behaviour.
I’ve never used it so I don’t know for sure, but that sounds like stage manager. I think the settings are in desktop and dock system settings.
It's a display resolution issue it transpires: tiling works at higher resolution setting but not at the lowest. Apple has form here with macOS not working consistently at all supported resolutions.
Thanks for the reply, but the guides don't address my issue. Further experimentation shows that I can properly tile windows in some apps sometimes. Mostly though windows don't conform to half screen widths outlined when snapped to either side, but extend beyond. Is there some window minimum width that I'm unaware of? (My MBPro display is necessarily operated at 1024 by 640 resolution.)
toodeep wrote:
Thanks, but stage manager was deactivated throughout.
Then I guess I don’t understand the problem. I have multiple windows spread out on the screen, and some filling the screen all the time.
I don’t pay attention to the current window tiling behavior, but the original tiling with full screen would not reduce the size of a window beyond what Apple thought was an appropriate width. I imagine it still works the same way. The screen resolution would affect that minimum width.
toodeep wrote:
Thanks again, but temporarily increasing display resolution makes the same previously unavailable windows available to tile, and they do. Unfortunately this isn't a solution for me.
I can't reproduce what you are experiencing.
I changed the resolution of my display the lowest it would go (960x600, a very meager one), and I did not have a problem. I am sorry, I have no idea why this happens in your mac, or how you could fix it.
Thanks, but stage manager was deactivated throughout.
Thanks again, but temporarily increasing display resolution makes the same previously unavailable windows available to tile, and they do. Unfortunately this isn't a solution for me.
Is window tiling across apps possible?
