AnyDrag

Move any window by holding a modifier and dragging anywhere on it — as smooth as a native title bar.

🇺🇸 English • 🇨🇳 中文

⭐ If AnyDrag makes your windows feel better, please star the repo — it helps others find it.
✨ More apps I made → xueshi.dev

Move any window by holding a modifier key and dragging anywhere on it — no need to aim for the title bar.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/82b18801-0f96-4e9d-b05a-ac7cdd18d490

Why AnyDrag?

Tools like BetterTouchTool offer similar modifier-drag features, but they move windows through the Accessibility API — an indirect path that routes every frame through the target app's process, adding noticeable lag.

AnyDrag takes a different approach: it simulates a native title-bar drag at the window-server level. The window moves exactly the way it does when you grab its real title bar by hand — zero per-frame IPC, no Accessibility round-trips, no lag. That smoothness is the whole point, and no other modifier-drag tool on macOS matches it.

✨ Features

Everything below is configured through a native System-Settings-style window — there are no config files to hand-edit.

🪟 Core gestures

Hold your primary modifier (Option by default) and:

🗂️ Tiling panel

Modifier + right-click opens a panel to quickly arrange the window:

• Move & Resize — snap to halves, quarters, or any zone
• Fill & Arrange — fill the screen, or lay multiple windows out side by side
• Full Screen — go full screen in one click
• Move to display — send the window straight to another monitor

↔️ Window Resize

Resize a window from its nearest corner without aiming for the tiny corner handle. It's opt-in, with two trigger modes:

• Right-drag — hold the primary modifier and right-drag.
• Left-drag — hold a dedicated Left-drag Resize Modifier and left-drag.

A glowing Corner Bracket indicator marks the active corner during the resize (toggleable for best performance).

🖱️ Middle-click → Tile by direction

Set the middle-click action to Tile by direction, then hold the middle button and drag toward an edge or corner to snap.

On a multi-monitor setup the panel lays out every display at its real arrangement, so you can pick any display × any zone in a single gesture. Landing on the middle cell of another display's card sends the window to that display unchanged — same size, same spot — instead of tiling it; the cell previews exactly where it will go. The middle cell of the display you started on stays the cancel target. A drag-only trigger mode keeps a plain middle-click fully native — the panel only appears once you start moving.

⌨️ Modifier keys

Choose your primary modifier — or a combo:

• Option, Command, Control, Shift, fn
• Combos like Option + Command
• Hyper — hold Caps Lock as the trigger. This works together with the sibling app HyperCapslock (enable "Hold CapsLock to drag windows (AnyDrag)").

If macOS "Hold ⌥ to tile windows while dragging" is enabled and AnyDrag's modifier is not Option, you can hold Option as an extra key for native tiling. For example, with AnyDrag set to fn, fn + option + drag starts a native drag from anywhere in the window and still triggers system tiling.

🛠️ More

• Excluded apps — list apps where AnyDrag never engages at all.
• Per-app fine-tuning — override the title-bar offset for specific apps when needed.
• Launch at login, menu-bar control, light/dark following the system.
• Localized UI — English / 简体中文 (follows the system language).
• Auto-update — built-in Sparkle.
• Privacy first — optional anonymous usage stats, off-limits to app names and window contents, and one toggle to turn them off entirely.

Usage

1. Launch AnyDrag — it lives in your menu bar.
2. Hold Option (default) and drag any window.
3. Hold the modifier and double-click a window to maximize it; double-click again to restore.
4. Hold the modifier and right-click a window to open the tiling panel.
5. Or set Middle-click action to Tile by direction, then hold the middle button and drag toward an edge or corner.
6. Click the menu-bar icon to change the modifier key or toggle AnyDrag on/off.

Screenshots

Install

Homebrew

brew install --cask XueshiQiao/tap/anydrag

brew tap XueshiQiao/tap
brew install --cask anydrag

Or download the latest .dmg from GitHub Releases and drag AnyDrag into your Applications folder.

The app is signed with an Apple Developer ID certificate and notarized by Apple, so it installs without any security warnings.

Permissions

On first launch macOS asks for Accessibility permission — required to detect the modifier key and move windows: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility

How It Works

A CGEventTap runs on a dedicated high-priority thread and intercepts mouse events only while the modifier is held. Instead of asking the Accessibility API to move the window frame by frame, AnyDrag rewrites the mouse coordinates into the window's title-bar region so the window server performs the drag natively — the exact same code path as grabbing the real title bar, with zero per-frame IPC.

That is why dragging feels native: there is no intermediary moving the window, the window server is doing it directly.

Tech Stack

• Native macOS — AppKit core (engine, menu bar, overlays); the Settings window is SwiftUI hosted in an NSHostingController. Swift 5.9, macOS 13+.
• CoreGraphics CGEventTap for input interception; window-server title-bar drag simulation for movement.
• Sparkle for auto-update.
• XcodeGen — project.yml is the single source of truth for the Xcode project.

Build from Source

Prerequisites

• macOS 13+
• Xcode 16+
• XcodeGen (brew install xcodegen)

Setup

git clone https://github.com/XueshiQiao/AnyDrag.git
cd AnyDrag
brew install xcodegen
xcodegen generate
open AnyDrag.xcodeproj   # Cmd+R to build & run

project.yml is the single source of truth for the Xcode project; run xcodegen generate after changing it.

Known Issues

• When used together with macOS three-finger drag, there is a one-frame snap flicker at drag-end.

License

GPL v3.0 — see LICENSE.