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by philsnow 2873 days ago
Wait no. I went from a Linux work laptop to a Mac laptop about five years ago and not having a dedicated modifier key (Mod4) for working with the window manager was a huge pain and a pretty steep un-learning curve.

On my personal laptop, the Mod4 key is just for me to use for customization.

1 comments

You manage windows with your mouse and the window title bars/borders. There are universal shortcuts available also, just like Cut, Paste, Print, etc. are universal.

Of course, in an ideal world, windows would be "spatial", remembering their position and size so they always opened exactly how you left them, so managing them with your mouse would be no big deal, and even more efficient and human-centric than whatever tiling WM Linux users think is cool today. But these days not even Apple wants to commit to that. Nevertheless, the paradigm of a universal set of commands that all applications respond to is central to the Mac user experience, and the window-management shortcuts Mac OS provides are part of this. You're just so used to a difficult-to-use OS where "window manager" is a separate concept that you have difficulty understanding the simplicity of how the Mac does things.

I’ve been an almost daily macOS user since 2006.

As far as I’ve been able to tell, you have to install third party software like Better Touch Tool or Spectacles if you want keyboard shortcuts for window management other than a full screen toggle.

Almost all of the window management functions of macOS are mouse driven and hidden behind slow animations.

Personally I find the experience awkward. I don’t like taking my hands off the keyboard just to snap a window to the side of the screen or move it to another display.

Compare that to Gnome where super-left snaps to the left instantly. Super-up toggles full screen and shift-super-up moves the window to the next screen instantly. All without the slow as molasses animations.

This post is. Uh. Excessive.

Posting from GNOME 3, where all my out-of-band shortcuts are on Super just as on a Mac. (Setting it up did take me a whole five minutes, granted.)