How to Tile Windows by Dragging to Screen Edges on Mac

In macOS 15 Sequoia, a window dragged against the edge of the screen snaps into a tile — halves at the sides, quarters at the corners, full screen width at the menu bar. It's the closest the Mac has come to Windows-style snapping, and it's all controlled by three settings. Here's how each drag works and how to tune or disable it.

How drag-to-edge tiling works

1. Grab a window by its title bar and drag it toward a screen edge.
2. Keep dragging until the pointer reaches the edge and pause for a beat — a translucent tile preview appears showing where the window will land.
3. Release the mouse or trackpad. The window snaps into the previewed tile.

Where you aim decides the shape:

• Left or right edge — the window fills that half of the screen.
• A corner — the window becomes a quarter tile in that corner.
• Top of the screen (the menu bar) — the window fills the whole screen, still in your current Space. Push further and hold, and it offers full screen instead.

To untile, just drag the window away from its slot — it returns to the size it had before you tiled it. fn + Ctrl + R (Return to Previous Size) does the same from the keyboard, and the Window menu's Move & Resize submenu lists every tiling position if you'd rather pick from a menu than aim a drag.

Hold Option to tile instantly

The pause-at-the-edge dance exists so you can drag windows between displays without accidentally tiling. If you want snapping with no pause, hold Option while dragging: tile previews appear as soon as the window gets near an edge or corner, and you can release immediately. With Option held you also get previews at positions the plain drag doesn't offer as readily — watch the outline as you move around the screen.

The three settings that control it

Everything lives in System Settings → Desktop & Dock, in the Windows section:

• Drag windows to screen edges to tile — the master switch for edge snapping. Turn it off if you keep triggering tiles while rearranging windows.
• Drag windows to menu bar to fill screen — controls only the top-edge "fill" behavior.
• Hold ⌥ key while dragging windows to tile — controls the Option-drag shortcut separately, so you can disable passive edge tiling but keep deliberate Option-tiling.

The master switch is also scriptable:

# turn off drag-to-edge tiling
defaults write com.apple.WindowManager EnableTilingByEdgeDrag -bool false

# undo: turn it back on
defaults write com.apple.WindowManager EnableTilingByEdgeDrag -bool true

Getting reliable snaps: the details

The pointer decides the tile, not the window's edges — macOS watches where your cursor touches the screen boundary. Aim the cursor, not the window's corner, and quarters stop being fiddly: push the pointer firmly into the actual corner until the quarter-shaped preview appears. Release early to cancel — if a preview forms that you didn't want, pull away from the edge before letting go and nothing snaps.

Moving a window to a second display without tiling it is the flip side: don't pause. The tile preview only forms when you linger at an edge, so a continuous drag across the display boundary sails through untouched. If you still trigger previews constantly mid-move, that's the case for turning off passive edge tiling and keeping only the deliberate Option-drag.

Two finishing touches. Tiles respect the Tiled windows have margins setting in the same Windows section — turn it off for flush, edge-to-edge snapping. And every drag target has a keyboard twin (fn + Ctrl + Left for the left half, and so on), which is quicker when you're rebuilding the same two-window layout for the tenth time in a day.

On Ventura and Sonoma

Drag-to-edge tiling requires macOS 15. On macOS 13 and 14 dragging a window against an edge just parks it there. The built-in alternatives are the green button's Split View, or Option-hovering the green button for Move Window to Left/Right Side of Screen — both covered in our complete window tiling guide.