eczarny/spectacle — Issue #31: Arbitrarily divide windows in half
Author: eczarny
Created: 2011-12-19 20:40:30+00:00
State: open
Labels: enhancement

I don't know how possible this would be from in terms of user experience but I figured it was worth writing down. The idea itself is rather simple:

> Allow people to use a hot key to split a window in half, not just moving a window to one half of the display.

Suppose you have two related documents open in BBEdit, an HTML file and a corresponding CSS file. You are using Chrome to preview that HTML file, and have the Chrome developer tools open in separate window. The ideal setup would be to have the preview in the left half of the display, the developer tools in the upper right corner of the display and the two BBEdit documents in the lower right corner of the display.

To accomplish this you would use the typical hot keys to move the preview and the developer tools to their respective destinations, the left half and upper right corner of the display. To share the lower right corner of the display amongst the two BBEdit documents you would need to:

1. Move the HTML document to the lower right corner of the display (*Cmd + Shift + Ctrl + →*)
2. Split the HTML document in half (using the new hot key, should land in the left half of the lower right corner of the display)
3. Move the CSS document to the lower right corner of the display (*Cmd + Shift + Ctrl + →*)
4. Split the CSS document in half (using the new hot key, should land above the HTML document in the left half of the lower right corner of the display)
5. Split the CSS document in half again (using the new hot key, should land in the right half of the lower right corner of the display)

The interesting point is what happens between steps 4 and 5, where using the new hot key more than once will cycle a window between halves. Of course, this behavior leads us to an interesting question:

> How will Spectacle know it should *move* the frontmost window to the next half or if it should *divide* the frontmost window in half itself?

Either way, this seems like a potentially powerful feature. If this functionality can be added without introducing more than one hot key it would be even better.