Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Impressions from a first-time Mac user

loganmarchione.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

671–680 of 756 posts

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#671

Post by BlueTemplar »

rodelrod wrote: post #661
BlueTemplar wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried this one ? http://norme-azerty.fr/en/

That looks like an "AZERTY International", with no advantage over the Portuguese layout for programming, and no advantage over "US International" for typing languages other than French. It does look like an improvement over traditional AZERTY! My choice is "US International with AltGr deadkeys". The deadkey behaviour in simple "US International" is very annoying for programming: you have to double-tap every key that…

> no advantage over "US International" for typing languages other than French

Uh, did you not even bother to click on the link or something ??

The easy access to all Greek characters (and more math symbols) alone is great if you work in a math-related field !

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#672

Post by colinmhayes »

ihateolives wrote: post #530
colinmhayes wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is simple. Don't minimize windows. Everything fullscreen on virtual desktops. Three fingers up and choose the window you want if it's one you don't use normally. Three finger swipe between frequently used windows.

Amazing that in the era of N+1K external monitors suggestion is still to use fullscreen windows.

This is where snapping comes in. You can make a fullscreen window that is made up of two applications. Really it just comes down to never fusing with your windows once you have them set up to your liking. Once everything is either fullscreen or in its corner of a virtual desktop you should never be changing how your windows work. Nothing should ever be hidden behind anything else, if it is it's time to make a new virtual desktop for it.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#673

Post by danaris »

iso1210 wrote: post #615
nneonneo wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cmd+` switches between windows of the same app, and it's actually more convenient (IMHO) than using Alt+Tab to switch between every one of your windows from every app. There are also a handful of trackpad gestures for showing all the windows in the current app or all of your windows.

It's inconsistent compared with alt-tab behaviour. cmd-tab switches to the last used application (assuming you don't hold down), right now for me that switches from Firefox to Slack. Pressing cmd-tab again switches from Slack back to Firefox. However for window switches cmd-` switches from my HN window to a jira window. cmd-` again switches to a webmail window. To switch from jira back to HN I have to press cmd-shift…

If you press Cmd-Tab, then let go, and press Cmd-Tab again, yes, you get back to the first application you were in.

If you press Cmd-Tab, hold Cmd, and keep hitting Tab, you cycle through the available applications.

If you press Cmd-`, get the window you want, and do something in it, then press Cmd-` again, you get back to the first window you were in.

If you press Cmd-` repeatedly, you cycle through the available windows of the active application.

There is a slight difference in how you trigger the two behaviours—and the behaviour of Cmd-` can sometimes be a little opaque, I grant, since "do something in the window" is not always 100% clear, either to the user or the computer—but they do have analogous behaviours.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#674

Post by colinmhayes »

loginatnine wrote: post #642
dsego wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All gestures on macos regarding virtual desktops and windows have corresponding keyboard shortcuts.

Still, it's not alt tab with the press-hold-release which is always quicker than doing gesture->arrow to select something->enter.

Completely disagree. Doing three finger swipe x times is just as fast if not faster than keyboard shortcuts that require you hunt down the window you're looking for.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#675

Post by danaris »

philsnow wrote: post #535
sooheon wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just the difference between a depth=2 tree and a flat list. What's better depends on your access patterns, but at least semantically, the tree makes a lot more sense to me.

I just wish "spaces" worked like xmonad workspaces [0], specifically that in xmonad there are some number of workspaces (9 by default) and each display is a view into _any_ of those. Macos has a checkbox "Displays have separate Spaces", and neither checked nor unchecked gives the behavior I want. Let's say I have just two monitors. That box being checked means I have spaces A1 A2 .. An and B1 B2 .. Bn, and monitor A…

> But if I want everything from B2 to get displayed on monitor A, I have to create a new space An+1 and drag everything over one window at a time, like a cave man.

That's...not true, though? Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're after...

When you activate Mission Control (not sure offhand what the default shortcut is; I have mine set to Ctrl-Up, but I might have customized it), you can drag entire spaces between monitors. I do this regularly.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#676

Post by sylens »

danaris wrote: post #273
deergomoo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, if you’re looking to snap two windows side-by-side (which I expect accounts for the majority of cases), iPadOS with a keyboard is actually more capable for that specific use case than macOS. I expect the same shortcut will make its way into the next Mac release, I just hope they don’t gimp it by tying it to full-screen mode.

Er...macOS has had the ability to put two windows side-by-side in full-screen mode for a few years now. Press and hold on the green "zoom" button and you'll get side-by-side options. It does not, and likely will never, have options for gluing two windows together and treating them as one in non-fullscreen mode. That seems like a fairly niche desire to me.

Yeah and the author was talking about how inflexible their side-by-side approach was - moves them to a new desktop and puts them into full screen

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#677

Post by DoingIsLearning »

pschastain wrote: post #648
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the thing GP is missing in his Linux criticism. Whatever you don't like you can just change. You can change to a different DE, change WM/themes/icons/dotfiles whatever you want, you can change. You are not constrained by a perscribed UX philosophy. To me personally that is very liberating.

I tried KDE and had different but equally frustrating issues. People say you can "just fix it yourself" with Linux but that's not always feasible or worth a person's time.

But whatever frustations you have, irrespective of what you feel is the time commitment, you can actually fix in Linux. With Windows/Mac you are stuck with those frustrations as 'prescribed' by however did the UX.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#678

Post by danaris »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #361
Aardwolf wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a mac user (but a linux user who chooses desktops with the windowing paradigms of like windows 2000 or so plus multiple desktops) so have no idea how it's like in practice, but: These days it's very common for more than half your work to take place in a browser, with many browser windows, each having many tabs Every window of the browser almost is like its own application for the user, yet they're all from th…

It doesn't work out well. This is an area of macos that grinds my gears daily. It gets even messier if you maximize an app, or use multiple desktops. Often I need to quickly switch between a particular terminal window to a particular browser window. But it's always a gamble. I don't know what I'm gonna get when I press cmd+tab. It may show the correct window, or it may show all terminal windows, or it may even do abs…

It's definitely not a gamble.

When you press Cmd-Tab, first of all, if you hold it down for longer than about a second, it shows you the icons of the currently-open applications, letting you select which application you switch to.

Whenever you use Cmd-Tab to switch to an open application, it will always foreground all the open windows of that application that are on the active desktop/space.

When I'm doing something like you describe, where I know I'll be switching back and forth between a specific pair of windows of different applications (and I have a bunch of other windows of those applications open), my usual practice is either to size and position them where I can just see both at the same time (large screens ftw), or I'll pull them off into a separate space where Cmd-Tabbing between the two applications will be guaranteed to switch between just those two windows.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#679

Post by cptroot »

mastazi wrote: post #469

I think this is a pretty fair article. I'll add one more: in MacOS there is no unified way to get to the beginning or end of a line. In Linux and Windows this is done with the Home and End keys. In Mac, there are some shortcuts but they are not universal, what works in terminal may not work in a browser textarea and so on. Some programs interpret the same shortcut as "go to the very end of the text (as in a PgDown ke…

Fn + left arrow is Home. Fn + right arrow is End.

Re: Impressions from a first-time Mac user

#680

Post by iso1210 »

danaris wrote: post #673
iso1210 wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's inconsistent compared with alt-tab behaviour. cmd-tab switches to the last used application (assuming you don't hold down), right now for me that switches from Firefox to Slack. Pressing cmd-tab again switches from Slack back to Firefox. However for window switches cmd-` switches from my HN window to a jira window. cmd-` again switches to a webmail window. To switch from jira back to HN I have to press cmd-shift…

If you press Cmd-Tab, then let go, and press Cmd-Tab again, yes, you get back to the first application you were in. If you press Cmd-Tab, hold Cmd, and keep hitting Tab, you cycle through the available applications. If you press Cmd-`, get the window you want, and do something in it, then press Cmd-` again, you get back to the first window you were in. If you press Cmd-` repeatedly, you cycle through the available wi…

Press Cmd, Press `, Release `, Release Cmd

You've swapped from window 1 to window 2

Press Cmd, Press `, Release `, Release Cmd

You swap from window 2 to window 3

Press Cmd, Press tab, Release tab, Release Cmd

You've swapped from application 1 to application 2

Press Cmd, Press tab, Release tab, Release tab

You swap from application 2 to application 1

That if you type something after swapping window and the behaviour changes is even worse!

For cycling

Press Cmd, Press Tab, release Tab, Press Tab, Release Tab, you can move from application 1 to application 3, although it doesn't switch immediately, just shows you a menu while you hold down Cmd

Do this with windows and the actual window changes as you move, not a menu

It's poor behaviour and one reason I prefer my linux desktop to my anicent macbook. (Another reason, I've got about 15 opwn terminals, but I can't just raise 1 terminal window above my browser, I have to raise them all. Of course there's no focus-follows-mouse either, it's all very user-unfriendly, at least by default. I'm sure there's some software that might fix this, but back in the 90s when I was using Windows I remember that sort of software was just terrible. The easier option is to finally fix my linux laptop, which died around the time covid started, and thus wasn't a critical path fix)

Post reply on HN