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by TheKnack 1254 days ago
Apps like Keyboard Maestro or BetterTouchTool can resolve almost every Macos usability complaint that I've heard. Keyboard Maestro can move windows between desktops with a keyboard shortcut, for example, and there are multiple ways to disable mouse acceleration. For almost every missing feature or annoyance in Macos, someone else has had the same thought and developed a solution.

https://forum.keyboardmaestro.com/t/move-frontmost-window-to...
2 comments
lynndotpy 1254 days ago
I should note that I consider this is one of the biggest flaws with MacOS. It really should not require someone to pick together disparate pieces of software to come to a state of usability.

It's like using Arch Linux, except the software costs money, is proprietary, and people choose Arch because they would prefer their own config over the comforts and defaults provided by other distros.

Configuring a MacOS machine might require spending over $100 on usability software, providing personal information to a myriad of companies (Tools like IINA or iTerm2 are the exception and not the default.), and even after all that you still have a variety of unfixable usability issues.

KeyboardMaestro is $36 and BetterTouchTool is $22. With KeyboardMaestro, it's not clear what the license is (which makes it concerning for use in the workplace.)

> For almost every missing feature or annoyance in Macos, someone else has had the same thought and developed a solution.

I do appreciate the effort, but this isn't true. You can no longer disable blocking animations in MacOS, there is no Spaces API for instantly moving a window from one desktop to another, etc. And any of this can break with a MacOS update, and there's no easy way to automatically configure a fresh install. (IME, MacOS users use Time Machine backups rather than a fresh-install bash script.)

From someone used to the comforts of Linux, MacOS takes a huge amount of effort and expenditure to only get 20% of the way there.

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Leimi 1254 days ago
> From someone used to the comforts of Linux, MacOS takes a huge amount of effort and expenditure to only get 20% of the way there.

You summed it up nicely!

Sadly even with all the apps like hammerspoon, tiling wms and others, there are lots of stuff you can't customize in the macOS environment.

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lycopodiopsida 1254 days ago
KeyboardMaestro is $36, Hammerspoon can do roughly the same and is free. Best part is: there is no pendant in linux, mostly due to the moving target of system configurations and DEs.
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lynndotpy 1254 days ago
What is pendant in this context? I assume it's an autocorrect error but I don't know what should be in its place...
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lycopodiopsida 1254 days ago
It is the counterpart: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pendant

There is no counterpart for Hammerspoon/KeyboardMaestro for macOS and AutoHotkey for Windows in Linux.

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lynndotpy 1254 days ago
I've never heard that word used this way, thank you!

That said, that makes sense. I don't have experience with AHK or HammerSpoon, but I'd expect this functionality to be very dependent on the display server and overall desktop environment.

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gspencley 1254 days ago
Can it resolve me not being able to use MATE as the desktop environment?

My biggest gripe with Mac OS X is the window manager. I want to be able to ALT+right-click anywhere on a window to be able to move it around, alt+left-click anywhere on a window to resize it. I want to be able to click the dock icon for an app I'm using and have the most recently used window of that app come to the foreground instead of however it makes that decision. I'd love to get preview thumbnails of windows when hovering over icons in the doc so that I can select the window I want. Right-click plus reading window titles takes longer to find the window I need.

I want to be able to customize my fonts because I have a hard time reading text on my QHD external monitor.

I want a terminal that doesn't suck (and yes I use iterm2, it still sucks because I can't quickly jump to the end / beginning of a line to edit a command).

I want to be able to select text to copy to clipboard and use my middle mouse button to paste and I want that to work for all programs.

I want to be able to hold ctrl plus use the mouse wheel to zoom in / out of web pages on chrome ... something Linux and Windows both do out of the box but it just doesn't work on Mac OS X.

I want to be able to customize all of this and not feel like I'm locked in to "the Apple way" of doing things.

I lot of this is just familiarity and getting really used to a particular DE over decades of use and taking little things for granted. If all you've ever used is a Mac then I'm sure you've figured out how to be hyper-productive on that DE. I just find it strange that, from a company that somehow positioned itself as UX leaders ... I find that I'm 1/10th as productive on my work Macbook as I am on any nix device (and while Mac might use a heavily modified NetBSD kernel IIRC and have zsh and bash ... it feels very different from a nix machine to me).

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grincho 1254 days ago
I can't solve all your problems, but here are a few I can do off the top of my head. I hope they help somebody.

Hold keys and click to move a window: https://mmazzarolo.com/blog/2022-04-16-drag-window-by-clicki.... I love it. Bind it to a mouse button with USB Overdrive for extra convenience.

In the terminal, use emacs-style bindings like ctrl-A and ctrl-E to move to the beginning and end of lines. On the Mac, Home and End are for beginning and ends of documents.

Use USB Overdrive or Steermouse to bind mouse buttons to whatever you want, including Paste. Select-to-copy might be impossible, though you could certainly do select-and-click-to-copy.

Cheers!

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