Mac Window Management for Alfred

This project helps with window management on a mac, leveraging the power of the Alfred Power Pack and Alfred Remote.

The intention is to help you move a window to the edge of the current display without resizing the window. It also helps with moving the window to the next display as well as centring¹ windows in the display.

Setup

• Download Window Snap.alfredworkflow from the releases page
• double click it to install the workflow in Alfred
• setup the hotkeys (Alfred removes these on installation of a workflow for your safety).

For reference, you can see an image below of how these hotkeys are set up in the Author's workflow. Those keys work as follows:

• ⌘↖︎ (CMD-HOME) - "left"
  • CMD-FN-LEFT on a compact keyboard
  • moves the current window to the left edge of the current monitor
• ⌘⇞ (CMD-PAGEUP) - "top"
  • CMD-FN-UP on a compact keyboard
  • moves the current window to the top edge of the current monitor
• ⌘↘︎ (CMD-END) - "right"
  • CMD-FN-RIGHT on a compact keyboard
  • moves the current window to the right edge of the current monitor
• ⌘⇟ (CMD-PAGEDOWN) - "bottom"
  • CMD-FN-DOWN on a compact keyboard
  • moves the current window to the bottom edge of the current monitor
• ^⎇⌘. (CTRL-ALT-CMD-PERIOD) - "center"
  • moves the current window to the centre of the current monitor
• ^⎇⌘, (CTRL-ALT-CMD-COMMA) - "next"
  • moves the current window to the next monitor

On an Apple laptop or bluetooth keyboard without the extended keys, you'll need to use the alternative key combination shown beneath each one.

Usage

Once the keyboard shortcuts are set up then moving windows around the monitor(s) (without resizing them) is simply a matter of using the hotkeys as configured.

It is also easy to set up a remote page as part of the workflow, simply add the suggested page from the Window Snap workflow in the remotes tab, here is what it looks like on the author's iPhone:

Advanced usage

There is a keyword for each of the four main operations, simply activate Alfred using your keyboard shortcut and type "top", "left", "right", "bottom" to move your current window to that edge of its current monitor. The underlying script allows more complication motions, for example it is possible to move the current window to the centre-right edge of the next monitor by activating Alfred and typing

move next center right

Specify any of the following valid keywords (case doesn't matter), in any order after the 'move' keyword.

• TOP
• BOTTOM
• RIGHT
• LEFT
• CENTER
• NEXT

Footnotes

1. Note that the documentation is written in British English (e.g. centre), whereas the code is written in American English (e.g. center). ↩