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Ask HN: Why does Apple refuse to add window snapping to macOS?

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Re: Ask HN: Why does Apple refuse to add window snapping to macOS?

#161

Post by mh- »

saghm wrote: post #151
lloeki wrote: post #141

Well, because it has? Hover over the green stoplight, you get a popover with fullscreen options. Press Option and the fullscreen options mutate into snap left/snap right/zoom. These can also be found in the Window menu. Again, press option to mutate the fullscreen ones to snap. And since these are menu options, one can set any keyboard shortcut of their choosing through the keyboard shortcut prefpane+. So it is not "…

The only Apple device I use is the laptop I was given for work, and I've always disliked that the button that would "maximize" the window on other OS instead makes the window "fullscreen" (getting rid of the menu and everything else that entails). I recently discovered that I am actually able to "maximize" by double-clicking the top bar of the window, but I have no idea if this is something that works by default or i…

Option-clicking the green maximize button is the shortcut I usually tell people about. If you hold down option, you'll notice that the mouseover for the green ball changes to a plus instead of the fullscreen icon.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Apple refuse to add window snapping to macOS?

#162

Post by pinkcan »

devilkin wrote: post #101

For the same reason they refuse to implement displayer multistream. And a gazillion other industry standards: because they can, and they feel that their way is the right way.

don't patents expire after 20 years? I'd assume some of those should be older by now, leaving me to think the reason lies somewhere else.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Apple refuse to add window snapping to macOS?

#163

Post by jwr »

rr842j wrote: post #30
modeless wrote: post #12

What about that interminable animation every time you fullscreen a window or switch between fullscreen windows? It should be at least twice as fast and there's not even any way to hack it to speed it up. You just have to live with it. ("reduce motion" changes it to a crossfade but doesn't make it faster) While we're at it, the Dock has always been bad. And the top menu bar was good for the original Macintosh with a t…

I still have to meet anybody that is not at a minimum annoyed by the macos animations. I literally stopped using the spaces feature because of that!. The default animation got me dizzy all the time, but even with that one disabled via accessibility settings they keep a terribly slow fading animation. It's absolutely ridiculous for a professional machine to impose these things on you.

Same here. I don't use spaces because I can't stand the animations, and they can't be turned off.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Apple refuse to add window snapping to macOS?

#164

Post by Veen »

ralfd wrote: post #41

My go to example to explain the One True Mac Way of Window management is the “The many windows of John Siracusa” podcast from ATP a few years ago. The relevant discussion starts at 1:33:00 https://atp.fm/episodes/96 Siracusa, who grew up as a (classic) Mac user, explains his tiling and overlapping habits to Arment and Liss, who grew up as Microsoft Windows users and later switched, and they gasp in utter horror, shoc…

Siracusa also developed an app to get Classic Mac window layering behavior on MacOS.

- https://hypercritical.co/front-and-center/

And one that gives him an application switcher that works the way he likes:

- https://hypercritical.co/switchglass/

Re: Ask HN: Why does Apple refuse to add window snapping to macOS?

#165

Post by jdlshore »

saghm wrote: post #151
lloeki wrote: post #141

Well, because it has? Hover over the green stoplight, you get a popover with fullscreen options. Press Option and the fullscreen options mutate into snap left/snap right/zoom. These can also be found in the Window menu. Again, press option to mutate the fullscreen ones to snap. And since these are menu options, one can set any keyboard shortcut of their choosing through the keyboard shortcut prefpane+. So it is not "…

The only Apple device I use is the laptop I was given for work, and I've always disliked that the button that would "maximize" the window on other OS instead makes the window "fullscreen" (getting rid of the menu and everything else that entails). I recently discovered that I am actually able to "maximize" by double-clicking the top bar of the window, but I have no idea if this is something that works by default or i…

Default behavior of the green button click is full-screen, but option-click maximizes.

The behavior of double-clicking the title bar is controlled by the "Dock & Menu Bar" settings pane. It can be configured to minimize the window instead. You can also double-click any edge or corner to maximize from that side alone. Option-double-clicking will grow both sides. I like to option-double-click my Terminal windows to maximize their height without changing their width.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Apple refuse to add window snapping to macOS?

#166

Post by extr »

fwlr wrote: post #105
modeless wrote: post #12

What about that interminable animation every time you fullscreen a window or switch between fullscreen windows? It should be at least twice as fast and there's not even any way to hack it to speed it up. You just have to live with it. ("reduce motion" changes it to a crossfade but doesn't make it faster) While we're at it, the Dock has always been bad. And the top menu bar was good for the original Macintosh with a t…

defaults write -g NSWindowResizeTime -float 0.01 should fix that (disclaimer - haven’t tested this in a long time, may need to restart apps or whole os to see effect). In general, if something about macOS annoys you and there isn’t a preference setting to fix it, googling “defaults write com.apple ” will often find a solution. Writing with `defaults write` lets you alter nearly any value in the OS, very few things ar…

Not really. Tons of these preferences are gated behind SIP, something you can't turn off if it's a work laptop.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Apple refuse to add window snapping to macOS?

#167

Post by ubercow13 »

fwlr wrote: post #105
modeless wrote: post #12

What about that interminable animation every time you fullscreen a window or switch between fullscreen windows? It should be at least twice as fast and there's not even any way to hack it to speed it up. You just have to live with it. ("reduce motion" changes it to a crossfade but doesn't make it faster) While we're at it, the Dock has always been bad. And the top menu bar was good for the original Macintosh with a t…

defaults write -g NSWindowResizeTime -float 0.01 should fix that (disclaimer - haven’t tested this in a long time, may need to restart apps or whole os to see effect). In general, if something about macOS annoys you and there isn’t a preference setting to fix it, googling “defaults write com.apple ” will often find a solution. Writing with `defaults write` lets you alter nearly any value in the OS, very few things ar…

It doesn't affect the fullscreen animation.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Apple refuse to add window snapping to macOS?

#168

Post by yongjik »

howinteresting wrote: post #124
rr842j wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have to meet anybody that is not at a minimum annoyed by the macos animations. I literally stopped using the spaces feature because of that!. The default animation got me dizzy all the time, but even with that one disabled via accessibility settings they keep a terribly slow fading animation. It's absolutely ridiculous for a professional machine to impose these things on you.

macOS is designed for mainstream users, not power users who want an efficient workflow with minimum distractions. This is why I stopped complaining about macOS and just use Linux.

Only if you're very lucky with Linux, or your definition of distraction does not include hours spent on fixing sleep and hibernation, finding the right input method among several that keep getting deprecated, fixing pixel scaling with multiple monitors, and other fun stuff.

I still have a Linux Desktop that I boot up from time to time, but I've pretty much given up at this point. My time is more valuable than that.

Re: Ask HN: Why does Apple refuse to add window snapping to macOS?

#169

Post by ShadowBanThis01 »

lloeki wrote: post #141

Well, because it has? Hover over the green stoplight, you get a popover with fullscreen options. Press Option and the fullscreen options mutate into snap left/snap right/zoom. These can also be found in the Window menu. Again, press option to mutate the fullscreen ones to snap. And since these are menu options, one can set any keyboard shortcut of their choosing through the keyboard shortcut prefpane+. So it is not "…

Apple loves to hide functionality to the point where it essentially doesn't exist.

When I started at Apple as an engineer, the first bug I filed was "Can't resize windows from their edges" (or any corner except one).

Just mind-bogglingly stupid. And when Apple finally does capitulate and admit that others have done it better, they petulantly try to hide the functionality anyway. In the case of the windows, there's no window border and the cursor frequently fails to change to the "resizing" one.

In the case of two-button mice, Apple came out with a mouse that hid the second button and in fact was nearly unusable because the entire shell was the button so you couldn't lift the mouse and keep the button held to continue a scroll.

And on and on.

Oh, and then Apple added Alt-Tab-style app switching... but it's often useless because when you Command-Tab to an app, Apple doesn't restore its window. It remains minimized and useless in the dock. There is a utility called Alt-Tab that lets you fix this, at least.

And those are just a couple...

Re: Ask HN: Why does Apple refuse to add window snapping to macOS?

#170

Post by alehlopeh »

Can an Ask HN self-post be clickbait? Apple isn’t refusing to do anything. They just haven’t done some minor thing that you personally would like. The fact that you’re “shocked” by something as banal as “lack of window snapping” is kind of funny actually.
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