Moom from Many Tricks is one of my favorite, unsung Mac utilities for reducing tedious busywork. It’s a menubar app that can move and resize one or all your open apps and windows just to your liking. Once you have all the typical apps and windows open for a typical workflow, you can save that layout as a “Snapshot” and recall it from the menubar or a keyboard shortcut to stop wasting all that time repeatedly moving and resizing windows.
To double-explode your mind, now that I own a second display (Apple’s Thunderbolt Display), I discovered Moom can work its magic automatically when you connect one or more external displays.
Once you set the windows of your open apps just how you like, use Moom’s menu to choose “Save Window Layout Snapshot.” This opens Moom’s Custom preferences setting where you can tweak your new snapshot, name it, and give it a keyboard shortcut. If you want Moom to use this snapshot when you connect an external display, enable the “Trigger automatically when” option, then choose “switching to 2 displays”, or however many displays you have.