Rooms
Keep a project's windows together, then walk into it with one shortcut while everything else steps back.
A room is a project you walk into: a set of windows and a layout. Enter one and its windows come to the display you are on and lay themselves out, with the gap you chose. Apps with nothing in the room hide, and other windows of the room's apps wait just off-screen. Nothing is ever closed.
Rooms are part of Window Management. They use its switch, its Accessibility grant and its gap setting. Rooms is based on Rooms by Sara Gordić, used with her permission under the MIT licence.
Making a room
- Open the windows the project needs.
- Run Switch Room, type a name for the room, and choose Create Room.
- Press ↵ on each window that belongs in it. To add an app that is not open, type its name and pick it: it opens whenever you enter the room. The number is the place, and 1 is the main window, which gets the largest spot. The preview shows the room as you pick.
- Press ⌘↵ to save. You walk straight into the new room.
Create Room in the launcher and New Room in Settings open the same picker.
Switching rooms
Run Switch Room. The selected room is previewed over your blurred desk.
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| ↑ ↓ | Pick a room; the preview glides to it |
| ⇥ / ⇧⇥ | Try the next or previous layout that fits this display |
| ↵ | Enter the room |
| ⌘K | Remember Arrangement, Choose Windows, Delete Room |
| ⌘⌫ | Delete the room; its windows stay open |
Every room is also a launcher entry, and each can have its own global shortcut in Settings → Window Management → Rooms.
Layouts
Tab offers only the layouts that fit the room's windows on this display, and each display remembers its own choice.
| Layout | Arrangement |
|---|---|
| Auto | The first tidy layout where every window is comfortable |
| Focus | The main window large on the left, the rest beside it |
| Stack | Focus, with the side windows overlapping so each title bar shows |
| Columns | Side by side |
| Grid | An even grid |
| Custom | Your own side-by-side arrangement, snapped to a grid with even gaps |
| As Arranged | Exactly where you placed the windows |
Arrange the windows by hand and choose Remember Arrangement: Tinycast recognises the layout and tidies it, or keeps your arrangement exactly. Apps that refuse to shrink are measured as you go, so the layouts make room for them.
Getting everything back
Quitting Tinycast, turning Window Management off, or opening Tinycast again after a crash brings every parked window back: each one's way home is written to disk before it moves. Turning Window Management off inside a room also shows the apps it hid.
Rooms work with ordinary windows on the current Space. Full-screen windows are left alone.