I’ve been a two or more Mac person for a very long time, but it was time to retire the 27-inch iMac and replace it with a Studio Display and my trusty MBP. And let’s be honest, moving between two computers daily, or several times a day, can sometimes be painful.
But I’ve discovered a new pain! Whenever I return home and plug my MBP in (clamshell mode), I am being frustrated by windows that are tiny and tucked into the bottom left of the display. Switch back to the MBP and they’re huge and not centred correctly.
Do I just have to suck it up or is there a tool I’m missing to help?
This allows you to save custom layouts of apps onto however many monitors you use, in the right position. These layouts can be activated with keyboard shortcuts, and since a recent update, Moom even launches these apps for you that belong to a certain layout in case they aren’t already running.
In my use case, at work I have 2 x 24" monitors and my MBP on the right hand side; at home, just the 1 x 24" monitor and MBP; and at other times just the single MBP. Therefore, I’ve saved three basic layouts with my frequently used applications, and this gets me up and running fast. It’s a matter of invoking Moom (one keyboard shortcut), and then hitting the next shortcut (you can probably shorten the path further with things like Apple Shortcuts or Keyboard Maestro). The other shortcuts you can see, ‘move and resize’, I have also mapped to quick key commands, and these are for my most commonly used screen splits for a variety of apps. I’ve used it for years and so this has become second nature – it is really fast.
Another suggestion I’ll make is to NOT use clamshell mode. I used to do this too until someone pointed out, why waste that beautiful MacBook Pro Display by closing the lid? Keep it open and have another display to use.
There are third party tools that can do all sorts of things. What I’ve discovered is a standard Apple menu item (which certainly hasn’t always been there). Window > Fill. It says there is a keyboard shortcut of ^-fn-F but that never works for me.
Things get a little funky after you do that if you try to move or resize the window.
Dragging it will snap it back to the size it was before, but it will at least be under your mouse pointer and not off the screen.
Funkiest of all is that you can do the Fill, then drag any sides/corners and get perfectly predictable behaviour, but, if you then drag the window it will still return to the pre-fill size.
In any case, I have found it useful to wrangle a window back onto the visible screen when going between built-in and Studio Display.
