Adobe apps on Mac OS Split View

Some Adobe applications definitely don’t support current macOS standard window management. Those applications, including Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, tend to be the ones that, for consistency’s sake, continue to maintain their original cross-platform window management that they’ve had since their original releases in the 1980s/1990s, long before Apple added Full Screen and Split View window modes to macOS. There is no way for us users to make those applications support macOS window modes, although people have submitted feature requests about it. It’s largely a matter of when each product team decides to make it a priority versus other things they want to add or fix.

They would also have to figure out how to reconcile macOS window modes with those original Adobe window management commands, such as the three View > Screen Mode commands that Photoshop and Illustrator have, because not all of them are supported in the macOS window manager and they don’t work the same way. In other words, they might have to lose a few features.

Some Adobe applications do support macOS Full Screen and Split View. These tend to be ones introduced more recently or where the product team chose to make it a priority to upgrade their window manager. For example, Acrobat and Lightroom Classic/Lightroom are Adobe applications that do support current macOS window modes such as Split View.

@SplatBat wrote:

Is there some other way to get the apps to tile / use split view?

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Update (2024): In Photoshop, Split View now works if you enable a new setting. In Photoshop Settings/Preferences, in the Workspace panel, select Enable Native Full Screen, click OK, and restart Photoshop. It turns out that enabling macOS native Full Screen also enables some other macOS window features such as Split View.

(Original answer below)

Those applications can tile their own document windows, so if you mean tile with other applications, some non-Apple utilities can help. For example, I use utility software called Moom (paid software, but it isn’t the only one that does this) which can apply all kinds of custom window arrangements, with optional keyboard shortcuts. It has a built-in command that can resize almost any application’s window (including the Photoshop application frame) to one half of the screen. That is not macOS Split View, it’s software resizing the window through scripting, but it still helps.