How to I get window drop functionality on Mac OS X?

Question

Windows 7 has a neat feature where the Windows Key in conjunction with the arrow keys tiles the active window. Windows key + left arrow moves it to the left half, windows key + right arrow moves your window to the right half of your monitor.

Is there an equivalent to this functionality in OS X?

Can anyone suggest some alternative metaphors by which to manage my windows? I find that OSX windows tend to be a bit more scatterbrained than their windows counterparts.

Answer 1

Funny thing. DownloadSquad just did a post today about an OS X tool to do exactly this. It's called ShiftIt.

Answer 2

I'm not familiar with the arrow key functionality but are you looking for something like Cinch?

It's not part of OS X, it's a third part app.

From their site:

"Cinch gives you simple, mouse-driven window management by defining the left, right, and top edges of your screen as 'hot zones'. Drag a window until the mouse cursor enters one of these zones then drop the window to have it cinch into place. Cinching to the left or right edges of the screen will resize the window to fill exactly half the screen, allowing you to easily compare two windows side-by-side (splitscreen). Cinching to the top edge of the screen will resize the window to fill the entire screen (fullscreen). Dragging a window away from its cinched position will restore the window to its original size."

The same company has a product (that I've never used) called SizeUp that seems to be mroe keyboard centric.

Answer 3

DoublePane does this exact thing for Mac. You can either use keyboard shortcuts or choose the left, right, maximize options from a menu.