Ever find yourself juggling multiple windows on your Mac, constantly clicking back and forth, wishing for a more streamlined way to work? You're not alone. That's where macOS's built-in 'Split View' comes in, a fantastic feature that lets you have two apps side-by-side, making multitasking feel less like a chore and more like a natural flow.
It's surprisingly simple to get started. Most apps on your Mac are designed to play nicely with Split View. The magic really begins when you hover your mouse pointer over the little green button in the top-left corner of any app window. Give it a moment, and a menu will pop up. From there, you can choose to 'Tile Window to Left of Screen' or 'Tile Window to Right of Screen'.
Once you've picked a side for your first app, your Mac intelligently shows you thumbnails of your other open applications on the remaining half of the screen. Just click on the one you want, and voilà! You've got two apps perfectly aligned, ready for action. It's like creating your own custom workspace on the fly.
What's neat is that this creates a new 'desktop space' for your split-screen setup. This means your menu bar and Dock might hide or appear as you move your cursor, giving you maximum screen real estate for your chosen apps. If you ever want to adjust how much space each app gets, just move your pointer to the dividing line in the middle. You can drag it left or right to make one app bigger and the other smaller. And if you want to go back to the original equal split, a quick double-click on that divider line will do the trick.
Sometimes, you might want to swap the positions of the apps. That's easy too. Just grab the toolbar of the window you want to move and drag it over to the other side. If you don't see the toolbar immediately, a click on the window and then moving your cursor to the top of the screen usually brings it back.
To exit Split View, it's just as straightforward. Click on the window of the app you want to focus on, bring up the menu bar again, and hover over that familiar green button. You'll see an option to 'Exit Full Screen' or simply click the button itself. The app you weren't focusing on will then expand to fill the whole screen, and you can access it from your Space bar (where all your different desktop spaces live).
This feature is incredibly handy for all sorts of tasks. Comparing documents, referencing information while writing, keeping an eye on your email while working on a project, or even just enjoying a video while browsing the web – Split View makes it all feel so much more integrated and less frantic. It's one of those macOS features that, once you start using it, you'll wonder how you ever managed without it.