31–40 of 56 posts
I set the Mac OS dock to auto-hide and it frees up, like, an inch of space. Blows me away when I see people with the default-sized dock always open. Any real reason for this?
Because you have to mouse over, wait half a second, then find and click the app you're looking for? I'd rather trade screen real estate for time.
related to TFA but different: does anyone know how to xrandr to arrange 3 screens into this arrangement: S C R E E N T H R E E screen one screen two so that moving the mouse vertically from screen 1 or 2 enters screen 3? That is: screen one LEFT-OF screen two screen one BELOW screen three screen two BELOW screen three Last time I tried this, it did not work (I assume because xrandr makes assumptions about physical mo…
I think for that kind of setup you have to specify based on pixels directly rather than relative. I think the "-pos" argument and you give the coordinates. It creates one giant virtual display (it's always a rectangle) that can accommodate the total resolution of all your displays so you might have to do some math to get it how you want. You could also try one of the GUI front ends to make a config for you like arand…
Select/single click paste. This is the big one. it turns copy/paste from a deliberate action to a natural motion. It always surprises me how infuriating going back to hotkey copy/paste is.
Point to focus. Point your mouse at what window you want to be active. Not a huge deal but it goes well with the next point.
Don't raise on click. usually I want a window where I am looking something up. And a window I am working in. I hate it when the window I am working in jumps to the top on focus obscuring the window I am looking at. It should only raise when I click a specific spot(usually the border).
If you get this far you realize that overlapping windows are not doing much for you. so you start using tiling window managers. Unfortunately some applications interact badly with tiling window managers. If you have such an application you may never reach this point of desktop efficiency.
Always found it strange that macOS didn't follow their OG NeXTstep design for the dock and menus.
As the menu, that's not surprising at all. After acquiring NeXT, Apple's job was to convert it into something palatable to Mac users, and which could also accommodate both converted Mac apps (via Carbon) and legacy apps (via Classic). And they had to move fast and decisively: the company's future depended on it. This absolutely required a horizontal menu bar.
NeXT's menu system wasn't all that great anyway: it was hard to hit. Fitt's law really is a thing. I loved the tearoff menus though.
> For a long time, the looks of macOS, and therefore the looks of elementary OS fascinated me. I found the dock elegant and the black bar at the top a needed bad.
> At least until I realized how wasteful this desktop paradigm is, as most of our screens, including TVs, laptop screens, and computer displays are horizontally wide.
Surely he knows that the dock can trivially be set to be vertical, right? Right?
> The top panel in macOS makes at least some sense due to their well-implemented global menu system. But what about applications that do not have menus? In that case, the top panel is just in the way of content.
Almost all applications of consequence have menus in MacOS. I guess a few /Applications/Utilities programs maybe...
(So you can't pin it to a corner like the top left, nor can you force it to extend over the full length of that edge.)
And you can extend the Dock in many ways, by adding folders or stacks, make them behave as menus or grids, ect.
I set the Mac OS dock to auto-hide and it frees up, like, an inch of space. Blows me away when I see people with the default-sized dock always open. Any real reason for this?
I like what I have with Sway: No visible docks or bars unless I press the Super key, which causes a bottom panel to appear. This design means maximum screen real estate for apps, with dock features available when I need them.
It is a good article but only starts to go into features I consider important for an efficient desktop system. Select/single click paste. This is the big one. it turns copy/paste from a deliberate action to a natural motion. It always surprises me how infuriating going back to hotkey copy/paste is. Point to focus. Point your mouse at what window you want to be active. Not a huge deal but it goes well with the next po…
Envious since I probably can't replicate all of your features on MacOS.