Resizing windows on macOS Tahoe – the saga continues

I’m a Windows guy, but was given a MacBook for my current job. Fair enough. But I laugh at how horrendous such a simple thing as resizing windows is. Want Slack to take up the right third of a screen then fill the rest with browser? In Windows, it takes 2 seconds. Not on Mac. I have to resize the window myself? There’s no auto-snap?

I’m sure someone will buzz in with some hidden way to do it. ‘Hold cmd-shft-9 then say these magic words and voila!’ No. Dragging the window with the cursor should suffice.

Edit: I’ll also add that having to buy a huge $200+ display adapter so you can connect 2 external monitors to a MacBook, whereas a slimline $30 device will do the same for Windows laptops, is total bullshit.

Many moons ago, I invented* a rule that "you can always make people feel what you want about a #. either use percentages where they don't make sense, or whole numbers when a percentage does"

I hear it when I read 7 px -> 6 px means 14%(!!!!) less likely to find the horizontal/vertical only drag area.

Fitts's Law is logarithmic, not linear, and at these sizes the dominant factor is whether the target is discoverable at all, not its sub-millimeter width. "14%" smuggles in precision that doesn't exist in the underlying motor reality; it takes an imperceptible physical change and launders it through a ratio with a small denominator to produce a number that feels alarming. You could just as honestly say "we moved the edge by 0.097 mm**" and nobody would blink.

* I think? It feels like there'd be prior art on this

**

  ppi = 262
  inch = 1/ppi
  mm = inch \* 25.4
  # 1px ≈ 0.097 mm ≈ 0.004"

Double-clicking the edge or corner of a window (anywhere a double-headed arrow cursor shows up) will resize it to the edge of the screen.

Hovering over the green dot in the title bar will bring up some simple window tiling options.

https://support.apple.com/guide/macbook-air/manage-windows-o... has more to say on the subject, more recent versions of the OS than I use have added more stuff in this vein, personally I just use Moom and have been for years.

I miss resizing windows with alt+right click

>In total the thickness went down from 7 to 6 pixels, which is a 14% decrease, making it 14% more likely to miss it.

Pedantic, but chance of miss is actually less than 14% more likely since the user's click location is not uniformly random over the thickness area, it's biased toward the center (normally distributed).