How to Turn Off Window Tiling When Dragging on Mac

macOS 15 Sequoia's drag-to-tile is great until it isn't: you move a window near an edge and it lunges into a half-screen tile you never asked for. The fix is two toggles in Desktop & Dock — and you can turn off the accidental snapping without losing tiling itself.

Turn off drag-to-tile

1. Open System Settings → Desktop & Dock.
2. Scroll down to the Windows section.
3. Turn off Drag windows to screen edges to tile.
4. Turn off Drag windows to the menu bar to fill the screen as well — that's the separate setting that makes a window jump to full size when you drag it to the top.

The change is immediate; no restart needed. Windows now go exactly where you drop them, even one pixel from the edge. To undo, flip the same switches back on.

Why this misfires so often in the first place: the tile trigger is a short hover near an edge, and on a laptop screen almost every drag ends near an edge. Park a window at the side to compare two documents and the outline swallows it. If that's your daily experience, these two toggles pay for themselves in an afternoon.

Keep tiling as an opt-in gesture

In the same section sits a third toggle: Hold ⌥ key while dragging windows to tile. Leave this on and you get the best of both worlds — a plain drag never snaps, but the moment you hold Option mid-drag, the tile outlines come back. Tiling becomes something you ask for instead of something that happens to you.

This is the setup most people actually want, and it's worth trying before turning everything off: accidental snaps disappear on day one, and you keep the fast half-and-half layouts for when a call for them comes up.

Keyboard and menu tiling keep working

Disabling the drag behavior doesn't touch the rest of Sequoia's tiling system:

• fn + Ctrl + ←/→/↑/↓ still tiles the front window to a half.
• fn + Ctrl + F still fills the screen; fn + Ctrl + C still centers.
• Window → Move & Resize still lists halves, quarters, and arrangements.
• fn + Ctrl + R (Return to Previous Size) still un-tiles.

So if you tile by keyboard anyway, there's no cost at all to switching the drag triggers off.

While you're in the Windows section

The same stretch of Desktop & Dock holds the rest of Sequoia's window behavior, and it's worth a one-minute audit while you're there:

• Tiled windows have margins — off gives flush, gap-free tiles when you do tile.
• Double-click a window's title bar to — Zoom (fill the screen without full screen) or Minimize; pick the one you won't trigger by accident.
• Prefer tabs when opening documents — set to Always to stop document windows multiplying.
• Close windows when quitting an application — controls whether apps restore their windows on relaunch.

A note for Ventura and Sonoma

These settings exist only on macOS 15. Ventura and Sonoma have no drag-to-tile — if windows are snapping on an older Mac, a third-party window manager is doing it, and its own preferences are the place to turn that off. The one stock behavior that can feel similar there is dragging a window against a screen edge and pausing, which switches Spaces rather than tiling.

Tame the margins too

If you keep tiling on, the same Windows section has Tiled windows have margins — turn it off for flush, gap-free tiles. More on that in the tiled window margins guide.