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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?

#151

Post by saghm »

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 if one of the various utilities I installed added this functionality. Either way, it seems basically impossible to discover other than by chance; if I hadn't double clicked that area by accident, I still wouldn't know.

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

#152

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#153

Post by tpmoney »

djfdat wrote: post #77
sys_64738 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the Windows choices are horrendous. Alt-tab to switch apps actually switches between browser tabs in Edge. It's really confusing. There's a litany of other problems too like virtual desktops move all screens instead of just the screen with the cursor, so it's unusable. There's also a case where certain actions with the mouse cause all the windows to vanish. I mean, what was that. Then there's that window hist…

Alt-tab to switch between browser tabs in Edge is new, a setting that you can turn off, and in some cases, it's actually very useful, since you can limit the number of tabs. It lets me treat recent tabs the same way as I would treat recent applications, which many websites effectively are. But anyways, that choice is made available to you. I don't currently use multiple monitors, but I do use virtual desktops, and...…

> but I do use virtual desktops, and... that's exactly how I would expect virtual desktops to behave? If it only changed a single monitor, does that mean you'd have to go to each monitor to change to a different virtual desktop?

Different strokes for different folks. In my setup yes, each of the three monitors has their own set of virtual desktops. When working on a project for example, I might have my center display configured with the IDE, and a second monitor configured with one virtual desktop per group of related reference materials. So I can switch between API docs, language docs, database query and reference etc on one monitor, while keeping the IDE front and center. The other monitor might contain a space with "office" apps (slack, email etc) and then another with a set of tiled terminal windows for using CLI utilities. If I switch that screen to look at emails, I don't need or want the other screens to change to something else.

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

#155

Post by serhack_ »

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…

Works by default

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

#156

Post by simonbarker87 »

I think this is more about the ethos of the Mac. Unix (which is the underpinnings of Mac) was all about lots of small tools that build together to make something great, and if the base OS doesn’t have what you want then that’s a great third party (or DIY) opportunity.

This bleeds over to the Mac in my opinion. I don’t want Apple to make everything, I want them to provide hooks and APIs that allow other people to make things to give me more choices as a user.

I don’t want big monolith applications (like Outlook), I want small applications that do one thing well.

So when people say “why doesn’t Apple do X?” And I see a dozen third party implementations I think “because they don’t need to” and that’s perfect in my mind.

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

#157

Post by bentcorner »

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…

I recently started using MacOS and fell into this habit as well - I just end up leaving windows open floating underneath other apps. I learned about cmd+` which is handy to deal with multiple windows of the same app.

In Windows I tend to minimize stuff I'm not actively working on (but not always). In general while I also have a lot of "background" windows it feels a lot less fiddly than MacOS.

Personally I don't like how "minimizing" apps on MacOS puts them in the temporary section of the launcher, I'd rather they minimize back down to where the icon of the app normally lives. I would end up with a bunch of black squares on the launcher in some random order with a tiny icon of each telling me which app this actually is.

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

#158

Post by sxg »

porphyra wrote: post #147

I really wish there was an i3-like tiling window manager for macOS. Yes, I'm aware of Yabai and others, but it's still not quite the same. Tiling apps bolted onto macOS's floating windows still feel sluggish, window decorations take up lots of space and are easy to accidentally click on (ruining the tiling), animations are annoying, focus doesn't follow mouse, keyboard shortcuts sometimes conflict, and so on.

I’m sure you’ve heard of Amethyst, but it does address at least a few of your concerns. Particularly focus following the mouse and conflicting shortcuts.

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

#160

Post by guitarbill »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #144
guitarbill wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Rectangle, which I moved to from Divvy: https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle

I use this too, but y’all are missing the point. I should not need third party tools like Rectangle and Mos to manage applications for an OS. I’d much rather have this functionality built in than have a dozen new emojis every year.

Why not? I dislike the Windows snapping behaviour for halves. Most macOS casual users won't need it. These apps work great and allow a lot of customisability that an OS-level snap might not provide. I'm but sure having it built in would be all upshots.
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