Rearranging windows

Swapping is always deliberate. A plain drag never rearranges anything by accident: you hold ⌘ while dragging, or use a shortcut.

Hold ⌘ and drag

1. Hold ⌘ and drag a window by its title bar.
2. Drop it onto another window. While you’re holding ⌘, the spot it will swap into is highlighted.
3. Let go, and the two windows trade places.

Drop a window on the primary window’s section and the dragged window becomes primary. You can press or release ⌘ in the middle of a drag; what’s held when you let go decides.

This works across screens too: ⌘-drag onto a window on another screen swaps them, and ⌘-drag onto an empty part of another screen moves the window there.

A plain drag

Without ⌘:

• Drop the window anywhere on the same screen and it returns to its place.
• Drop it on another screen and it joins that screen as its newest window. If that screen is already full, the window returns.

Dragging a window’s edge resizes instead. It never swaps. See Resizing.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	What it does
⌃⌥← → ↑ ↓	Swap the active window with its neighbor in that direction
⌃⌥↩	Swap the active window into the primary position

• Which neighbor: from the primary window, ⌃⌥→ goes to the window at the top of the right-hand column. ↑ and ↓ move within a column.
• No window that way: the window moves to the next screen in that direction, if that screen has room. Screens follow the arrangement in System Settings → Displays.
• Feedback: the window simply moves. If there’s nowhere to go, nothing happens.
• Holding the keys swaps once, not over and over.

What doesn’t swap

Nothing happens when you drop a window on a floating window, or drag or use a shortcut on a window that isn’t tiled: a dialog, an excluded app, or Shoji’s own windows. Shortcuts also do nothing while tiling is off, paused, or waiting for permission.

Why not ⌘ and an arrow?

⌘ with an arrow already moves to the start or end of a line, and the top or bottom of a document, in almost every app. Shoji uses ⌃⌥ so it never gets in the way.