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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?

#331

Post by gibbitz »

lolinder wrote: post #289
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 "…

It's weird that Apple is obsessed with gesture-oriented interfaces—even for things that really don't call for a gesture—but when there's a super intuitive gesture pretty much everyone else has settled on they decided instead to rely on a hidden context menu.

Like scroll direction, having a sim card in your phone, using accepted standard cables, giving users access to their own files, using standardized file formats, etc. These guys abuse their users and somehow they believe Apple cares about them. Not sure when everyone will wake up and realize that arbitrary change isn't better than expected behavior. I guess when the industry points "AI" at generating OSes then Apple will start questioning their decisions to stay viable in a sea of clones that actually "just work" as expected. Until then they'll just keep treating their users like crap.

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

#332

Post by namtab00 »

donatj wrote: post #133
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…

Windows users who just maximize everything all the time and get giant empty white bars on the sides of their browser shock me. What an insane waste of space. You see windows users with Ultrawides and a maximized browser where the site is centered and 90% of the width of the screen is serving nothing but site border and it just makes me scream. macOS replacing the “Zoom” stoplight buttons with “Full Screen” as the def…

it's not about maximizing the window you're interested in, but ALSO "minimizing" (hiding) what you are not focused on at that moment.

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

#333

Post by fyloraspit »

ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #169
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…

I think bettertouchtools is the best to get macos to the point of usability with regard to window management and other general OS QoL.

Linux really does beat out everything for this type of stuff imo. The best window management, sometimes even by default and everything customisable almost to the point of perfection.

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

#334

Post by mook »

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 "…

FWIW, it seems like if you assign a shortcut to the snap commands, they show up in the menu even without Option. So as a workaround you could assign extremely difficult to use keys just to keep them in the menu.

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

#336

Post by wellthisisgreat »

ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #169
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…

> when you Command-Tab to an app, Apple doesn't restore its window.

You can hold OPT as you pick the window in the cmd+TAB mode, and that would open all of its windows.

It's quite convenient actually.

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

#337

Post by sleepybrett »

When I was annoyed with this I went ahead and downloaded phoenix (https://github.com/kasper/phoenix) wrote a little javascript and now I have a bunch of globally accessable hotkeys so I can lay my windows out in a number of combinations. Right now I have setups for over/under left/right, two by two grid, and three by three grid.

I've got some plans to spend some time enabling more arbitrary grids and subgrids but I haven't gotten to it yet.

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

#339

Post by devnullbrain »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #296
SebastianKra wrote: post #256

I always feel like Apple must have some grand 1000IQ concept for window management and I just don't get it. Stage Manager, Spaces, Mission Control, Expose, Window Zooming, Hiding, Minimizing (which is different from Hiding), Fullscreen/Splitscreen... yet the first thing I do is install a third-party window manager. I tried for months to go vanilla and get my head around the features. But why, why do fullscreen window…

If you look at old screenshots of how people used desktop computers [1], it was rare to see fullscreen windows, even on the tiny monitors of the day, and when most people used only a single monitor. Today, we all have gigantic monitors, many have more than one, but for whatever reason people want to maximize or tile windows. Maybe it's the influence of the fullscreen only, unitasking paradigm from phones and tablet c…

>Maybe it's the influence of the fullscreen only, unitasking paradigm from phones and tablet computers, but it just doesn't make much sense to me on a desktop computer.

Completely the opposite. It's the influence of having computers powerful enough to have massive multitasking. Arranging windows like papers on a desk is easy when you have a handful of simple programs and a couple of browser windows - it's very different when you have 100 tabs with their own task-swapping logic in front of 20 other programs. You've already lost easy swapping so you might as well gain the extra pixels.

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

#340

Post by [deleted] »

alehlopeh wrote: post #170

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.

[deleted]
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