Hacker News Reader

Comment by neodymiumphish | Hacker News Reader

I’ve tried many apps for window resizing on Mac, and none feel like they’re nearly as good as FancyZones (the PowerToys module for Windows). I don’t want secret squirrel key combos. I don’t want hot corners.

I want two things:

- Predefined zones à la FancyZones - Tied edges (there’s surely a better term for this) so that I can grab the edge between two apps and have them both resize together (one gets smaller as the other gets bigger).

Please someone tell me this exists without a subscription!

View on HN

I think for preexisting solutions, the "best" one is Rectangle Pro, but it isn't free, so maybe that doesn't count. That said, eventually I realized I don't even want the whole "window split" stuff and I'd prefer to just have a few keybinds that throw windows into specific coords on my screens, so I installed Hammerspoon (free) and wrote a screen's worth of Lua to do this for myself. It is written for my two adjacent 1440p monitors and personal preferences, but the code is really obvious so if you're comfortable with making your own bespoke solution, this is pretty nice, and free.

* https://www.hammerspoon.org/

* https://gist.github.com/joedrago/bfc54f4083b070fe998d519cc6c...

Swish⁽¹⁾ lets you drag the divider to resize multiple windows at once. BentoBox⁽²⁾ is inspired by Fancy Zones. And Lasso⁽³⁾ is a grid-based window manager with custom layouts. There's also MacsyZones⁽⁴⁾ that appears to resize multiple adjoining windows but I've never used it (it appears to be open-source with an option to pay to support the author).

⁽¹⁾ https://highlyopinionated.co/swish/

⁽²⁾ https://bentoboxapp.com/

⁽³⁾ https://www.thelasso.app/

⁽⁴⁾ https://macsyzones.com/

I like powertoys but it’s taking 1.17Gig of space. That should be illegal

There are like two dozen apps inside powertoys...

Winamp was like 5MB. Starcraft 1 was something like 900MB. None of the two dozen apps are doing anything that should take so much space. It's probably all bloat from various dependencies. People's expectations of software quality have gotten very low.

Seriously. The collection of tools there shouldn't even be 1/3 of the space being used. Software is so bloated now a days it's crazy to say "ahh 1 GB no problem", "ahh 2GB of memory usage no problem". I hope the RAM + SSD shortage change people's perspective about this.

Common fonts are gigabyte downloads these days thanks to emoji support.

> FancyZones

I use BentoBox on my MacBook and it is just as good as FancyZones on Windows. I think I paid 9 dollars, and I have it for life.

Funnily enough, I bought BentoBox a long time ago (Nov 2024), but I forgot about it entirely. I'm wondering if maybe it didn't have Windowed mode at the time, as I do rely a lot of overlapping windows so I can switch between content more quickly when I'm just using my mouse.

Thank you for mentioning it again so I could get it set back up. I do like that the experience is almost exactly like FancyZones!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com