Better Mac multitasking with Better Window Manager

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Calling all Mac multitaskers! If you struggle to juggle all of your open apps, Better Window Manager can help. It lets you save the position of windows and provides shortcuts to restore windows to your preferred states.

Better Window Manager is available direct from the developer’s site. It costs $3 but you can try before you buy with a 7-day trial. According to the developer, Better Window Manager doesn’t work with Adobe apps because “they don’t use the Apple API’s for window elements that make them controllable.”

Once installed, Better Window Manager places an icon in the menu bar that lets you save the position and size of your current window state. It doesn’t save the positions of all of your open windows — just the foremost window. And once saved, the position can be used by any application and not just the application that you used to create to create the shortcut.

This means that you can’t have a single state saved in the app that, for instance, puts one window on the left edge of your screen and another along the right edge. To create such a setup, you would need to create two saved states in Better Window Manager — one for the left justified window and one for the right justified window. And then you must call up each state one at a time. Thankfully, the app shows you a where a window will open via shading on a small icon next to each of your saved window states.

To save a window’s position, choose the Save Window State option from the menu bar icon and then give it a title and a keyboard shortcut. You can also choose to have the keyboard shortcut active only when your chosen application is the foremost application or active no matter which application you are currently using. And if you use multiple monitors, click the box for Prefers source display and Better Window Manager will restore the window to whichever display you are using when setting up the shortcut.

In addition to your saved window states, there are four default states that I found useful: fullscreen and centered large, medium and small.

(Via One Thing Well)