How to Tile Four Windows in Quarters on Mac

A 27-inch or larger display is genuinely a four-window canvas: mail, notes, browser, terminal, each in its own quarter. macOS 15 Sequoia finally does this natively with corner tiling. Here's the drag, the menu commands, the shortcut situation, and what's realistic on Ventura and Sonoma.

Quarter tiling on Sequoia: drag to a corner

1. Drag a window by its title bar toward any corner of the screen.
2. When the pointer nears the corner, a quarter-size outline appears behind the window.
3. Release — the window snaps into that quarter.
4. Repeat for the other three windows and corners.

Two refinements worth knowing. Dragging to an edge (not a corner) tiles a half instead, so aim deliberately. And if the little pause before the outline appears annoys you, hold Option while dragging — the tile outline appears immediately wherever you hover.

The menu route, and shortcuts for quarters

Every quarter position also lives in the menu bar: Window → Move & Resize → Top Left / Top Right / Bottom Left / Bottom Right. The same submenu has halves, Fill, Center, and — the undo — Return to Previous Size (fn + Ctrl + R), which puts the front window back where it was before tiling.

Out of the box, only the halves get shortcuts (fn + Ctrl + ←/→/↑/↓) plus Fill (fn + Ctrl + F). Quarters don't ship with keys, but you can add them:

1. Open System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → App Shortcuts.
2. Click +, leave Application on All Applications.
3. Menu title: type Top Left exactly, assign a combo, click Done. Repeat for the other three.

The bottom of the Move & Resize submenu also offers arrangements that place your most recent windows together in one go — including a four-window quarters layout — useful when the windows are already open and you just want the grid.

Flush corners: kill the margins

By default Sequoia leaves a small gap between tiled windows and the screen edges. For a true edge-to-edge grid, open System Settings → Desktop & Dock, scroll to Windows, and turn off Tiled windows have margins. Toggle it back on to restore the breathing room.

On Ventura and Sonoma: the honest picture

macOS 13 and 14 have no quarter tiling. Split View (hold the green button) gives you two windows side by side, but it's full-screen halves only — no quarters. Your realistic options:

• Size the grid manually once. macOS remembers window positions per app, so a hand-built four-quarter layout tends to survive relaunches.
• Third-party tiling utilities — the established window managers all do quarters with hotkeys on any macOS version.
• Upgrade to Sequoia if your Mac supports it; tiling is one of its best quality-of-life features.

Living with a quarter grid

A few practical notes once the grid is up. Tiled windows are still ordinary windows — you can raise, type into, and scroll each one independently, and dragging a tiled window out of its corner releases it at its previous size. The grid is per-display and per-Space, so a four-up layout on your external monitor leaves the laptop screen alone. And be realistic about screen size: quarters shine at 27 inches and up. On a 13-inch MacBook display, four windows means four cramped peepholes — two halves, with Cmd + Tab covering the rest, is usually the better layout there.