Down with Divvy

Divvy, by Mizage, is a workspace management utility for Mac OS X. Divvy, as its name suggests, lets you “divvy” up the size of your windows on the fly.

Why is this application useful?

Take this scenario:

You have two Finder windows open. One window is overlapping another. With Divvy, you can assign the size of the top window to occupy 50% of the left side of your desktop. You can assign the bottom window to occupy 50% of the right side of the desktop. No more window shuffle. Divvy is similar to what Windows 7 offers with its “shake” feature to display two documents side by side. But Divvy offers a greater level of control on where those windows are displayed on your desktop.

Here’s how to use Divvy:

1. Select a window on your screen, whether it’s an application window or Finder window. A user-assigned hotkey is all it takes to invoke Divvy (I use Option-Control-Spacebar). When the Divvy panel shows up, you can click and drag to resize the window interactively.

2. Your window automatically snaps to the adjustment.

Divvy’s preferences are divided into two tabs. The first, dubbed General, includes options to customize the Divvy hotkey, start Divvy at login, and optionally keep the Divvy panel open until dismissed.

In the Shortcuts tab, you can assign custom hotkeys to automatically designate predefined window sizes. You can see some of the window settings I have defined in the screenshot below:

In my experience with the tool, I was able to get Divvy to work with most of the windows I juggle on a regular basis, including browsers, Finder windows, MarsEdit, and the like. In my testing, Divvy did not work with Adobe Bridge CS4. This is because applications like Bridge do not allow OS X to resize its windows. If OS X cannot resize the application’s window, then neither can Divvy. The Divvy FAQ mentions this.

Divvy works with multiple monitor set-ups, displaying a separate grid panel for each display. I found this to work as advertised.

One feature I would love to see is the ability to have user-configurable rows and columns, to make the window sizing grid even more refined.

Divvy is shareware. It costs $14. If you have multiple Macs, one license can be used on all your machines. Site licenses are also available. You can try before you buy, which is what I suggest.

In the week since I’ve begun using the product, I’ve found Divvy to be very useful. I have since registered it with the developers.

–Krishna

Krishna May 22, 2010 Mac productivity, useful utility, workspace management software