A window manager for macOS

Draw where a window should go. Give it a shortcut.

left half · 1/2 × 1 of the screen

Drag across the grid, or focus it and use the arrow keys.

  • ⇧ extends
  • ↩ places
  • Esc resets

Halves and quarters on keys, like everything else. Then draw any region you want, name it, and bind it. Free and open source.

Download for macOS 13+See it work

See it working

Shortcuts, then the grid overlay, then drawing a region and binding it to a key.

Draw any region

A region stores the fraction it covers, not the cells you drew it on, so changing your grid later never moves your windows.

  1. Two thirds of a three-column grid2/3

    Draw it. Drag across the grid.

  2. Left two thirds, bound to a shortcut2/3⌃⌥2

    Bind it. Press ⌘S before you let go, name it, give it a key.

  3. The same two thirds on a twelve-column grid, on the same shortcut8/12⌃⌥2

    Press it, from then on. ⌃⌥2 puts the active window there, in any app. Change your grid to twelfths later and the same key still gives you two thirds.

How custom regions work →

Or just press a key

Eleven shortcuts out of the box. Every one is rebindable.

Center keeps the window at its current size, and Open grid places nothing at all, so neither has a shape to draw.

Every default shortcut →

It stays out of the way

Orthant never becomes the frontmost app, so the window you are arranging stays active while you arrange it. It has no Dock icon, and it idles at 0.0% CPU with 0 wake-ups.

A shortcut snaps a window within its own display, not the one your pointer happens to be on. The overlay is the other way round: it appears on every screen at once, and the window lands where you drew it, which is also how you send one to another display.

Install

brew install --cask orthant-app/tap/orthant

Free and open source. Signed by the developer and notarized by Apple. No account, no telemetry in the app.

Or download the disk image and drag Orthant to Applications. Either way you get the same build. Requires macOS 13+.

Orthant moves other apps' windows through the macOS Accessibility API, which macOS gates behind System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security ▸ Accessibility. It is the only permission Orthant asks for, and first launch walks you through granting it. The full walkthrough →

Orthant updates itself in place, so brew upgrade deliberately skips it rather than fighting the built-in updater.

Latest release: 1.0.1.

Windows support is planned, behind the same interface. Linux is not possible: Wayland does not let one app move another's windows, by design.