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Moving a macOS window by clicking anywhere on it

mmazzarolo.com

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Re: Moving a macOS window by clicking anywhere on it

#121
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly when I can't deal with a mac as a desktop. My 30 year old muscle memories created in the late 80s with TWM use alt (on a std kbd, would be cmd on mac) + mouse button 1..3 to move, resize and iconify windows. Kde supports this, ldxe supports this, etc. I tried and abandoned using a mac as a desktop ~15 years ago because I didn't have this feature, and I didn't have true focus-follows-mouse. I don't wan…

It sucks when you're unable to overcome old habits...

It sucks when UI designers don't provide ways to configure software..

Re: Moving a macOS window by clicking anywhere on it

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I would find it far, far more useful if it maximised the window rather than full-screening it. At the very least, having it configurable would be nice.

Holding the option key allows exactly that. Menu item is called 'Zoom' for some reason.

Hmm.. that doesn't quite do what I'm after — make it the full size of the screen. It looks like it's similar to the old macOS behaviour that made the window 'as big as its contents'.

Re: Moving a macOS window by clicking anywhere on it

#123

I don't understand how MacOS is constently praised for its UI while half the comments here mention a third party app just to make it usable. Maybe it's just me, but I owned a Mac for over 5 years and I could never wrap my head around how MacOS handles windows and open apps.

Resizing windows is a weakness of Mac OS. It mostly retains the original fully manual method of dragging the edges of individual windows which is a fiddle process. There are some methods like mentioned in the original post, but that is about it. For that reason there are dozens of third-party tools, many free, that people use and like for their particular ways of working. It would be nice if Apple were to look at these and implement a basic verion of one or more of them in the OS.

The “stoplight buttons” on windows are part of a very opinionated solution to window management that works from some people but is a complete mess if you don’t like full-screen apps. I would prefer if we had the option to convert the full-screen button to a maximize window button. Double-clicking on the window header is close.

The other thing that Windows users complain about it that closing a window doesn’t close the app. That one is just a confusion because they are used to how Windows windows. The Mac OS convention of keeping the app active is not wrong, it’s just a different approach and the kind of conceptual change that users need to make when they switch OSs.

Re: Moving a macOS window by clicking anywhere on it

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait... you can actually maximise without going full screen? I thought Apple would never back down on that - I use a third-party app to do this usually. If there's a similar thing to let me make a window full height and half width, and to center a window, I can get rid of that app altogether...

You can also double click the title bar, or option-click the green full screen button to maximize to the current window.

For me, double-clicking the title bar minimizes a window.

Re: Moving a macOS window by clicking anywhere on it

#125
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first one is not a bug, it's designed like that. Icons in icon view can be positioned arbitrarily and have no order. You can't easily extend the selection with shift clicking because in that view, it's not obvious what that gesture is supposed to be extending beyond the thing being clicked on. It's worked like that since MacOS Classic.

Sure one can find all sort of arguments why this is, but it still violates the principle of least surprise. I don't think anyone would go and say, "oh this is an icon view without clear order, so I should not be able to select a group of icons".

It doesn't violate the principle of least surprise if you're basically inventing the convention, which is the case here. There's a slightly different convention in some subsequent systems but they typically don't have arbitrarily positionable icons. The MacOS convention has been around for nearly 40 years.

Re: Moving a macOS window by clicking anywhere on it

#126

I use https://rectangleapp.com/pro and really enjoy this app (I paid for it, it gets a lot of updates/fixes). It mostly takes care of snapping and resizing windows with hot keys, but has a less obvious feature in preferences to use mouse. My setup is: CMD+SHIFT will move any window under mouse pointer CMD+SHIFT+CTRL will resize any window under mouse pointer

I'm using Spectacle for 5-6 years.. I see now that it's no longer maintained, and Rectangle was developed based on Spectacle.

Re: Moving a macOS window by clicking anywhere on it

#127
post #84

I don't understand how MacOS is constently praised for its UI while half the comments here mention a third party app just to make it usable. Maybe it's just me, but I owned a Mac for over 5 years and I could never wrap my head around how MacOS handles windows and open apps.

Have you ever noticed that you can't cut and paste files with right click or the drop down menu in OSX? It's been a few years since I've used OSX, but every version I've ever tried has this intentional bug. I say intentional because when I first got a mac in the 10.4 days I noticed that 'cut' was greyed out in the menu so I thoughtfully filed a bug report. To their credit they did answer the bug report several years…

The mac model since the beginning is direct manipulation, not "select subject then apply verb". Obviously there are plenty of exceptions (for example text editing does include cut/paste!) but that's the baseline approach. And Windows made some specific design decisions to be different from Apple to reduce conflict (i.e. lawsuits).

In addition the UX research on direct manipulation vs select-and-operate seems to have shown that the mac made the right call, but the only work I've read in that area was done long ago.

This BTW is why shift-select doesn't work in icon mode (as a different commenter posted) because it was confusing for some people in a way that just drawing a selection for icons is not.

Re: Moving a macOS window by clicking anywhere on it

#128

I don't understand how MacOS is constently praised for its UI while half the comments here mention a third party app just to make it usable. Maybe it's just me, but I owned a Mac for over 5 years and I could never wrap my head around how MacOS handles windows and open apps.

There are so many bugs in the OS and I just work around them. Two recent ones I can think of: Issue 1 is: Shift+click selection doesn't work in Finder's Icon view. To reproduce: In finder select the "icons" view. Click on the first item, Hold shift, and while holding shit then click on the tenth item. Expected behavior is to select Items 1-10 including ten. Workaround: Switch to list view. Issue 2: Lock screen keyboa…

I hear ya on issue 2, it’s one of the very few gotchas I run into (hot corners don’t work in this view either). If you weren’t aware, you can exit mission control with ESC or F3 again, if you’re used to that shortcut.

There must be something special about the overview screen that is stopping all default behaviour when in this mode, the cursor keys don’t work here either.

Re: Moving a macOS window by clicking anywhere on it

#129
post #53
post #46

I've had `OnWindow Mod1 Mouse1 :MacroCmd {Raise} {Focus} {StartMoving}` in my fluxbox keys config for a decade or so? My brain will automatically issue and alt-click on a window in some other OS and I'm always jolted back to the reality that I'm not in my usual window manager. Now if only I could rebind that cmd ctrl on macos to alt.

Can you not do that just fine with karabiner-elements?

Does it require karabiner-elements even? The Keyboard pane in System Preferences lets you rebind all of the modifier keys -- I use it to make the Caps Lock key a Control key.

Re: Moving a macOS window by clicking anywhere on it

#130
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly recommend Swish as an alternative to Rectangle. Recently discovered it and wouldn't go back. The main thing that sold me is the ability to resize two windows by dragging the divider between them (similar to how Windows works). https://highlyopinionated.co/swish/

Doesn't seem very useful if you use your Mac with a normal mouse though.

I don't utilize the touchpad gestures at all. It provides a full set of keyboard shortcuts.
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