Moom

In my previous article, “Moom is a Real Thing,” I gave a brief overview of Moom. In this article, I’m going to cover the basics I go through when setting the application up, and cover some more advanced tips and tricks. Hopefully this is useful if you have trouble understanding Moom’s full power. Let us begin.

General Settings

First, let’s look at the General settings section within Moom. To bring up the settings, click on the Moom menu bar icon, and click Settings. I like to change Moom to run as a “faceless” application, which means there will be no Dock icon, menu bar icon, and the application is otherwise invisible from the OS X interace. To bring up Moom and its settings, you can double-click on the application icon. Otherwise, Moom will quietly sit there in the background, waiting for you to harness its power.

The Moom “faceless” mode setting.

Mouse Settings

Next, let’s adjust the Mouse settings with Moom. The Mouse settings control two things:

1. The Zoom Button Controls
2. The Snap to Edges and Corners

The Mouse settings screen.

Zoom Button Controls

The Zoom Button Controls are the controls that are shown when you hover over the green plus icon at the top right of OS X applications.

The green plus button.

You’re given options to make the window full-screen, half-left, right, top, and bottom. You can also click and drag on the grid to have more fine-tuned control over the window’s dimensions.

The Zoom Button Controls.

I mostly leave the Zoom Button Controls options as default, but I do adjust the Move & Zoom grid size to be 8x6, offering up a little more control of the sizing.

The Zoom Button Controls settings.

Snap to Edges and Corners

With this feature, you can drag the window to each side of your screen to have the window snap to set dimensions. I turn the delay all the way off in order to prevent issues with holding windows at the edge to move them to an alternate OS X Space.

The Snap to Edges and Corners settings.

Keyboard Settings

Next up, let’s adjust some of the Keyboard settings. I use alt+tab as my trigger to bring up the Moom window, but use whichever keyboard shortcut you’re most comfortable with. The other settings that I use look like the following, some of which are just the defaults that Moom ships with:

The Keyboard settings.

Custom

The real power of Moom lies in the Custom settings that allow you to create specific window configurations and snapshots that can be triggered by a keyboard shortcut, or even by the display resolution changing.

Multiple Displays

The first set of custom shortcuts that I use deals with multiple displays, and they are as follows:

1. Center the current window with alt+shift+enter.
2. Move window to secondary display and center it with alt+shift+m.
3. Move window to secondary display and make it full-screen with alt+shift+cmd+c.

The Custom multiple display actions.

The second and third custom shortcuts are performed by setting two separate actions to the same keyboard shortcut, which, in Moom, will allow you to set a Sequence Hot Key that runs both actions through the same keyboard shortcut. Let’s look at how we can set this up:

1. Click the + icon at the bottom right.

2. Click the dropdown and change the value to Move to Other Display.

3. Set the direction to the side that you set your secondary monitor to.

4. Check the Loop through displays option so that continually hitting the shortcut will cycle the window through the displays.

5. Set the keyboard shortcut (mine is alt+shit+m).

The first action for our shortcut.

6. Hit the + icon again.

7. Click the dropdown and change the value to Center.

8. Change the Position window at value to actual screen center.

9. Set the hotkey to the same as what you set for the previous action (alt+shift+m).

The second action for our shortcut.

10. Select Assign Sequence Hot Key.

The Assign Sequence Hot Key window.

The Sequence Hot Key for the two actions.

Shortcuts

The next set of custom shortcuts are using keyboard shortcuts for controls that exist in other parts of Moom. For me, I can more quickly use a hotkey to trigger one of these shortcuts than I can by bringing up the Moom window (via the trigger, or by hovering over a window’s plus icon) and triggering the action there. Let’s go through each of these, starting with the Move & Zoom set.

1. Make the current window full-screen with alt+1.
2. Make the current window half-left with alt+2.
3. Make the current window half-right with alt+3.
4. Make the current window half-top with alt+4.
5. Make the current window half-bottom with alt+5.

Sizing

The next set of custom actions is for sizing of windows. They are as follows:

1. Increase (grow) the size of a window by 50px on all sides with alt+shift+=.
2. Decrease (shrink) the size of a window by 50px on all sides with alt+shift+-.

The Sizing actions.

I find these controls really quite useful for quickly increasing or decreasing the size of the current window. Each of the two actions are a set of four individual actions that are combined as a sequence hot key. Let’s go through how to set them up. We’ll use the increase (grow) set as the example:

1. Click on the + at the bottom right.

2. Click the dropdown and change the value to Grow.

3. Set the keyboard shortcut.

The Sizing actions.

4. Click on the + at the bottom right.

5. Click the dropdown and change the value to Grow again.

6. This time, change the radio select position to the bottom (instead of the right).

7. Set the keyboard shortcut to the same as what you set for the previous action.

8. Select Assign Sequence Hot Key.

9. Repeat for the left and top sides.

Once you have four actions for Grow, each increasing a side (right, bottom, left, top) by 50px, you’ll have an action that will grow a window. The Shrink action follows the same steps, except the size is being decreased by 50px on all sides.

Window Snapshots

The final area of custom actions is for window snapshots, which are specific arrangements of windows that I, as an OCD-er, find very useful. To create a window snapshot:

1. Set up the window, or windows, the way that you want them arranged.
2. Click on the + at the bottom right.
3. Click the dropdown and change the value to Arrange Windows.
4. Enter a title.
5. Set the keyboard shortcut.

If you want the arrangment snapshot to take effect when the resolution of your monitor changes (e.g. when you unplug from an external monitor), then you can check Trigger automatically when, and adjust the dropdown value to the resolution that you want it to detect. You can also choose to have it triggered when there is a certain number of monitors being used.

That’s All, Folks

Those are the basics of how I set up Moom on a fresh install. Hopefully it proves useful to you.