How to disable window tiling on a Mac (and stop windows snapping)
You drag a window a little too close to the left edge and it flings itself into a half-screen tile. You nudge one toward the menu bar to get it out of the way and it fills the screen. If you want to know how to disable window tiling on a Mac, the controls are all in one place — but there are four of them, they govern different gestures, and turning them all off is usually not what you actually want.
Here's what each one does, how to switch it off, and how to tell whether macOS is even the thing doing the snapping.
The four settings that control tiling
They live in System Settings → Desktop & Dock, in the Windows section. On macOS 26 (Tahoe) Apple labels them like this — the wording shifts slightly between releases, but the four behaviours are the same since Sequoia:
| Setting | What it governs | Turn it off if… |
|---|---|---|
| Drag windows to left or right edge of screen to tile | Dragging a window against a side edge snaps it to that half; corners give quarters | Windows tile when you were only moving them |
| Drag windows to menu bar to fill screen | Dragging up toward the menu bar makes the window fill the display | Windows keep "going full screen" by accident |
| Hold ⌥ key while dragging windows to tile | Tiling on demand: hold Option mid-drag and the window tiles, without going near an edge | You never use it, or Option-drag conflicts with an app |
| Tiled windows have margins | The gap macOS leaves around each tiled window | You want tiled windows flush against each other |
The first two are the ones people are looking for. The third is the interesting one — more on that below.
How to disable window tiling on a Mac
- Open System Settings from the Apple menu.
- Click Desktop & Dock in the sidebar.
- Scroll down to the Windows section.
- Switch off Drag windows to left or right edge of screen to tile and Drag windows to menu bar to fill screen.
That's it — no logout, no restart. Drags become plain drags again immediately.
While you're in there, one neighbouring setting causes a very similar complaint: Drag windows to top of screen to enter Mission Control. If your window doesn't fill the screen but the whole desktop zooms out instead, that's the one you want.
Doing it from the Terminal
If you're setting up several Macs, or you keep a dotfiles script, these
are the same four toggles in the com.apple.WindowManager domain:
defaults write com.apple.WindowManager EnableTilingByEdgeDrag -bool false
defaults write com.apple.WindowManager EnableTopTilingByEdgeDrag -bool false
defaults write com.apple.WindowManager EnableTilingOptionAccelerator -bool false
defaults write com.apple.WindowManager EnableTiledWindowMargins -bool false
Log out and back in (or killall WindowManager) for them to take
effect. Set any of them to -bool true to restore the behaviour.
What stays on after you turn tiling off
This is the part that trips people up: those toggles govern drag gestures only. Everything else macOS does with tiled windows is still there.
- Window → Move & Resize in the menu bar still offers halves, quarters, Fill and Center. Hold Option in that menu for more layouts.
- The keyboard shortcuts still work — Globe/Fn-Control-Arrow for halves, Globe/Fn-Control-R to restore a window to its previous size. (If they don't, that's a separate problem: see tiling shortcuts not working.)
- The green traffic-light button still opens the tiling menu on hover.
- Split View — the dedicated two-app full-screen space you get by holding the green button — is unrelated and unaffected. It's covered in our split screen guide.
So you can't really "turn tiling off" in the sense of making it disappear. What you're turning off is tiling firing without being asked, which is the actual complaint.
Still snapping? It's probably not macOS
If windows keep resizing themselves after all four toggles are off, something else is doing it. In rough order of likelihood:
- A third-party window manager. Rectangle, Magnet, BetterSnapTool and friends implement their own drag-to-edge zones that are completely independent of the macOS settings. Check the menu bar, and check System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions for something you installed and forgot.
- Stage Manager. It doesn't snap windows to edges, but it does resize and reposition them when you switch sets, which reads as the same thing.
- An external display being connected or disconnected. macOS reflows windows when the display arrangement changes; that's not tiling, and no toggle stops it.
- The app itself. A few apps (browsers restoring a session, some Electron apps) set their own window geometry at launch.
The setting most people actually want
Here's the honest version of this problem. Almost nobody wants a Mac that can't tile. What they want is a Mac that doesn't tile by accident — because the trigger is a mouse gesture you perform hundreds of times a day for reasons that have nothing to do with tiling.
That's exactly what the third toggle is for. Turn the two edge-drag settings off and Hold ⌥ key while dragging windows to tile on, and tiling only ever happens when you deliberately hold Option. Drags stay drags. It's the best configuration macOS offers out of the box, and it's off by default.
The next step is dropping the drag entirely. If tiling is something you do deliberately, it may as well be a keystroke: that's what Let's Tile is. Press ⌘↵ and a grid drops over the window you're in — arrow keys to move the highlight, Shift-arrows to resize it, Return to snap. Nothing fires on a drag, because Let's Tile has no drag zones at all; the mouse is never a trigger. The free tier is a 3 × 2 grid (halves, thirds, two-thirds, quarters, full screen) and it stays free.
Frequently asked questions
Does turning off tiling delete my current layout? No. Windows already tiled stay where they are. The setting only affects what happens on your next drag.
Can I disable tiling for one app only? Not through System Settings — the toggles are system-wide. The closest thing is a per-app exception in a third-party tool, or using Option-drag mode so nothing tiles unless you ask.
Why do my windows have gaps between them when tiled? That's Tiled windows have margins. Switch it off and tiled windows sit flush. See macOS Tahoe window management for the rest of what changed.
I turned everything off and windows still resize when I drag them between monitors. That's display reflow, not tiling. Check for a third-party window manager first; if there isn't one, macOS is repositioning windows to fit the display they land on.
Is there a way to get tiling only from the keyboard? Yes — turn off both edge-drag settings and use Window → Move & Resize, the Globe/Fn-Control-Arrow shortcuts, or a keyboard-driven tiler like Let's Tile. Our guide to tiling windows on macOS compares the options.