How to Remove the Gaps Between Tiled Windows on Mac

Tile two windows side by side in macOS Sequoia and you'll notice thin strips of wallpaper between them and around the screen edges. That's a deliberate design choice — and a single toggle removes it. Here's where the setting lives, the Terminal equivalent, and what changes.

Why tiled windows have gaps at all

When macOS 15 introduced built-in tiling, Apple added a few points of breathing room between tiled windows and the screen edges, so tiles read as separate windows rather than one merged block. It looks relaxed in screenshots, but on a 13-inch MacBook display those margins are pixels you paid for doing nothing. If you tile to see more content — two documents, code beside a browser — you probably want edge-to-edge.

Turn off tiled window margins in System Settings

1. Open System Settings from the Apple menu.
2. Click Desktop & Dock in the sidebar.
3. Scroll down to the Windows section.
4. Turn off Tiled windows have margins.

The change applies the next time you tile. Windows already tiled keep their old geometry until you re-tile them — press fn + Ctrl + Left or Right again and they'll snap flush against each other and the screen edges.

This setting only exists on macOS 15 Sequoia and later. Ventura and Sonoma have no tiling engine, so there are no margins to remove — their Split View is always edge-to-edge.

The Terminal route

The toggle is backed by a real preference key, so you can script it:

# edge-to-edge tiling: turn margins off
defaults write com.apple.WindowManager EnableTiledWindowMargins -bool false

# undo: restore the default margins
defaults write com.apple.WindowManager EnableTiledWindowMargins -bool true

No restart needed — the next tile you make picks up the new value. Flipping the toggle in System Settings and running the command are exactly equivalent; use whichever is closer to hand.

Before and after

With margins on, two half-tiled windows sit with a visible gutter between them and a frame of wallpaper around the outside — on a 14-inch MacBook Pro that's roughly a centimetre of screen spent on styling. With margins off, the boundary between two tiles is a single shared edge, and window content runs to the screen edge exactly like a maximized window. Text-heavy work benefits most: two documents side by side each gain a few lines' worth of width.

One thing the toggle does not change: the gap logic in Arrangements (tiling three or four windows via Window → Move & Resize) follows the same setting, so quarters go edge-to-edge too. There's no per-app or per-display version — it's one global switch.

What the toggle does and doesn't touch

The margins setting governs the tiling engine everywhere it appears: the fn + Ctrl keyboard shortcuts, the green button's hover panel, drag-to-edge snapping, and multi-window Arrangements all produce flush tiles once it's off. It does not affect Split View — the full-screen, two-app mode has always been edge-to-edge — and it doesn't change ordinary window dragging, which never had gaps to begin with.

A quick way to see the difference: tile Safari left and Notes right with margins on, then flip the toggle and tile them again. On, there's wallpaper in the gutter between them and a frame around the outside; off, the two windows meet at one shared edge and the desktop disappears entirely.

Why does Apple default the margins on? The gaps suit the rounded, floating-window look of modern macOS, and on a 27-inch display the cost is invisible. Laptop users feel it most: on a 13-inch screen the margins can cost a couple of text columns across two tiles. Tile occasionally for comparisons, keep the gaps; tile as your default layout, go flush. Either way it's one toggle deep and instantly reversible.

Now learn the tiling shortcuts

Margins off makes tiling look right; the keyboard makes it fast. The complete set of fn + Ctrl shortcuts is in window tiling keyboard shortcuts on Mac.