How to Split Screen on Mac (Split View and Tiling)

Key takeaways

• Hover the green button → choose a tiling option → click a second window.
• On macOS Sequoia and later, dragging a window to a screen edge tiles it.
• Split View creates a new full-screen Space — swipe with four fingers to leave it.
• Escape or hovering the green button again exits.
• Drag the divider to rebalance; drag it to an edge to end the split.

How do I split the screen on a Mac?

1. Move the pointer over the green button at the top-left of a window — hover, do not click.
2. Choose Tile Window to Left of Screen or Right of Screen.
3. The window snaps to that half and your other windows appear as thumbnails on the other side.
4. Click one to fill the remaining half.

Clicking the green button rather than hovering sends the window full-screen instead, which is the single most common mistake here.

Dragging to tile

macOS Sequoia added window tiling by dragging:

• Drag a window to the left or right edge — it fills that half.
• Drag it to a corner — it fills that quarter.
• Drag it to the top edge — it fills the screen.

A translucent outline previews the result before you release. This is faster than the green-button menu once it becomes habit, and unlike Split View it does not create a separate Space — the windows stay on your normal desktop, which most people prefer.

Split View versus tiling

They look similar and behave very differently.

	Split View	Tiling
Creates a new Space	Yes	No
Menu bar	Hidden until hovered	Always visible
Other windows	Inaccessible without leaving	Still there behind
Exiting	Escape or green button	Just move the window
Available since	macOS El Capitan	macOS Sequoia

If you find Split View claustrophobic — and many do, because it hides everything else — tiling is what you actually want.

Working inside Split View

• Resize by dragging the black divider. Some apps have a minimum width and will not shrink past it.
• Swap sides by dragging a window's toolbar across the divider.
• Reveal the menu bar by moving the pointer to the top of the screen.
• Switch out with a four-finger swipe left or right, or Control-Arrow. The split stays intact in its own Space.
• Mission Control (F3, or three-finger swipe up) shows the split as a single unit at the top of the screen.
• Capture just one half with Shift-Command-4, as covered in how to take a screenshot.

Getting out

Three routes, in order of reliability:

1. Press Escape.
2. Hover the green button and choose Exit Full Screen.
3. Drag the divider all the way to one edge — the other window closes out of the split.

If none respond, the app has stopped handling events. Press Option-Command-Escape to force quit it; the remaining window returns to the desktop by itself. The Activity Monitor guide covers what to do if force quitting becomes a pattern.

When an app will not enter Split View

Not every window can be tiled. Common reasons:

• The app does not support full screen. Some utilities and older software never adopted it.
• The window is a dialog or panel. Preferences windows and inspectors are not tileable.
• A minimum width is set. Two wide apps cannot both fit on a small display.
• The app is already full screen. Exit first, then tile.

The green button is greyed out in these cases, which is the fastest way to tell.

Making it worthwhile on a laptop

Split View on a 13-inch display gives each app roughly 640 points of width, which is narrow for anything with a sidebar. Two things help:

• Hide sidebars in both apps.
• Increase screen real estate under System Settings → Displays by choosing a "More Space" scaled resolution. Text gets smaller — which pairs badly with a short display timeout if you are working at a distance, something the Lock Screen settings control.

For reference-and-write workflows — a document beside a browser — the split is genuinely useful. For anything needing three windows, tiling into quarters serves better than Split View ever will.