How to organise window viewing areas in Mac OS

Introduction

Tips to organise Windows on Mac? ?

Before we begin, we’ll clarify ‘Windows’ as the viewing area of your apps, not as Windows OS.

Organising and efficiently using the real estate you have on your Mac is really important. You can easily have a large screen and feel so cluttered with the cascading windows over windows. Even having a little MacBook with a window organiser software will be more productive.

There are lots of great apps that do the job, but I’ve picked one I found the most handy and that blew my mind.

What is the best app to use?

I’ve gone through different apps that do the same main function like Spectacle and Divvy. But I’ve recently discovered Hammerspoon, especially its config community. The reason being that I’ve found a set of community ‘user configurations’. These are totally editable under a file called ‘init.lua’, a Lua file.

Of course, you don’t have to know Lua to use the app. I’ve hand-picked among the community configs one that I find the best to use in my honest opinion.

How to install HammerSpoon Config on Mac

For this quick and saucy tutorial (and the config I currently use) I will be using Miromannino’s Hammerspoon Config.

First, Download the latest version of HammerSpoon here, and unzip the file and install.
Then, you can visit the Community HammerSpoon Config files here.
Download your config file of choice, or use Miro's window management
Open your Finder, and press CMD+Shift+G, then type
```
~/.hammerspoon
```
.
Unzip your config file, and move it’s files (not the folder) into the .hammerspoon folder

How easy are the shortcuts?

Hyper + Arrows.

These are literally all you have to know as the shortcut template.

For this config file the shortcuts defined use the ‘Hyper’ keys — meaning Ctrl+Alt+Cmd — and an obvious arrow-key either left, right, up, or down, and any other direction in between!

Say we want to move the window to the:

Left-side: Shortcut will be ‘Hyper + left-arrow’. Your window will go 1/2.
Press that same keyboard shortcut again, and you will go 1/3, and then the less prominent 2/3.
Same thing goes for Up, Down, and Right.
Even better, you can use ‘Hyper + left + right’ to fill the screen horizontally!
Or use ‘Hyper + up + down’ to fill the screen vertically!

So if you’re lazy in filling up the screen, just use one or the other. So first fill in Horizontally, then Vertically. Or Vertically, then Horizontally.

Why should I use a window organiser for Mac OS in the first place?

It saves time, and a lot of it.

It is not only the amount of time it takes to resize and drag the window, but you get distracted having to focus on just pointing on the edge of the window to drag it.
You create this feeling of “I might do it wrong”. And yes, there are times you might not click on the edge properly.
You are still wasting valuable cognitive resources to do better tasks, like keeping yourself on a focused mental state to complete a task at hand.

If you could do it with a shortcut and make best use of the real estate that you have, that would save you painstakingly resizing/dragging your windows!

Final Thoughts

This is one of the great tips once you own a Mac OS — to make sure that you have a window organiser.

In a free and open-source case we are using HammerSpoon, but this is only my recommendation.

There are lots of great window management apps out there that can do the job just as well as HammerSpoon and that I salute to the developer community for providing a wide range of choices.

My best tip would be to go through these different window organising apps for yourself, and choose the one you are most comfortable with.