Back in December I wrote about Cinch, a tiny little app that lets you drag application windows around to the edges of your screen, and have them instantly resize to something useful.
Cinch is mouse-oriented, but has a keyboard-oriented cousin called Sizeup. Today, a comment on that old post alerted me to a free, open source rival to Sizeup called ShiftIt.
ShiftIt is pretty minimal. There’s no Dock icon, just the word “Shift” in your Menu Bar. There are no preferences yet, so you can’t change that to an attractive icon, nor can you edit the built-in keyboard shortcuts for moving windows around.
But it does what it claims to, and has a decent variety of window arrangement options for any purpose you can imagine.
If you’ve been wanting a tool that does this job, but didn’t want to shell out a few dollars for something like Sizeup or Cinch, ShiftIt is a worthwhile alternative. If a handful of prefs appear in future releases, it will be a much more compelling one, too.
Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He also writes for the Press Association and The Morning News. You can find out more at his website, and follow him on Twitter @gilest.
