KeepTop Alternative: Pinning a Window and Shrinking It Are Two Different Jobs

KeepTop is a free utility on the Mac App Store. It is 1.4 MB. Open it, pick a window from the list, and that window now floats above the others.

The real question is smaller than the feature list: do you want it to stop being covered, or do you want it to stop taking up room?

Those sound like the same wish. They are not, and the difference decides whether you need a different tool.

What KeepTop does

It does one thing: it changes a window’s level.

1. Open KeepTop
2. It lists the windows on the current desktop (hit refresh if not)
3. Select the one you want and pin it

The window now floats above normal windows. Free, no ads, no subscription, 1.4 MB — worth saying, since plenty of similar tools ship dozens of megabytes of features you never asked for.

It solves “being covered”

If your pain is one of these, KeepTop is enough:

• Reading a PDF beside the document you are writing
• Keeping a log window around and glancing at it for errors
• Leaving an agenda visible during a call

The common thread: the window being large does not bother you, because you want to look at it.

It does not solve “taking up room”

In real work the opposite case is more common: the thing you need to watch does not need to be that big.

A 1440-wide terminal where you read the last three lines. A stock ticker where you only care whether the colour changed. A chat window where you are waiting for a new message. Floating them at full size means trading half your screen for one line of information.

KeepTop cannot help here, because it pins the window at its original size. There is no shrink, no hover preview, no transparency, no “show me only this corner”.

Three ceilings that come with the category

These are not KeepTop’s faults. They are shared by every “raise the window level” tool, and they matter when you are choosing:

1. Full screen makes it vanish

A full-screen app owns its own Space, and floating windows live in the desktop Space. Go full screen in your editor and the pinned window is gone.

(The exception is native Picture in Picture, which has system permission to cross Spaces. But it only floats video — see the no-install guide.)

2. “On top” is not “out of the way”

A window on top means it covers what is underneath. To click something below it, you still have to move it or unpin it. What saves time is a window that occupies less space, not one with a higher level.

3. Three windows make a mess

Pin three and you have three large panels covering each other. No window level solves a shortage of area.

The two approaches compared

The left column is KeepTop-style pinning; the right column is the shrink-it approach.

	Pin	Shrink
Size	Unchanged	Small, in a corner
Area	Large	Small
Content	All visible	All visible, small
Detail	Already large	Hover for a big preview
Input	Native window, click anything	Click inside the preview (Pro)
Full screen	No	No
Count	Works, but they cover each other	Works, one per corner
Cost	Free	Free tier limited, Pro one-time

When KeepTop is the right answer

To be fair: if your need is purely “keep this large window from being covered”, KeepTop is free, light and sufficient. There is no reason to switch.

It suits people who pin one window, do not need it smaller, and rarely work full screen.

When to change the approach

If any of these sound like you, what you want is a smaller window, not a higher one:

• You want it to shrink instead of eating half the screen
• You only care about state (done yet? new message? number moved?), not content
• You need to watch two or more things at once
• You work full screen often, and a pinned window that vanishes breaks the flow

PipNow takes the second path: ⌥⌘P turns the frontmost window into a floating mini window, hovering it pops a near-original-size preview, and you can click and type inside that preview. The window itself stays small, but you never switch back just to read it.

The free tier covers daily use: one mini window, hover preview, shortcuts. Multiple windows and in-preview interaction are Pro.

In one line

KeepTop solves “do not cover me”. PipNow solves “do not take up my screen.” Decide which one you are, then install — both are free to try, and five minutes settles it.