[_jab]

Between the rounded corners that don't reach the edges of the viewport, and the behavior when opening a new app for the first time, it feels like Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle.

Does anyone actually do this? Especially for heavy-duty applications like my web browser and IDE, this has always felt like a bizarre assumption to me.

[dbatten]

> it feels like Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle

IMO, this has been their assumption for years, and it actually turned me off when I tried getting used to Mac circa 2006-2007. Coming from Windows at the time, I just couldn't get over a weird anxiety that my application window wasn't maximized, because it didn't look like it completely snapped into the screen corners.

Now, using 34-inch ultrawide monitors almost exclusively, I never maximize anything... it'd be unusable.

[ffsm8]

As a 38" ultrawide owner myself, I use vscode or intellij maximized most of the day, depending on the codebase I'm

Browsers only ever get maximized to the left/right half screen for me too

Which is something macos should really improve on though, the ux is pretty bad compared to Windows and Linux there

[jmspring]

I split a vs code window and a browser or a browser and terminal window on my 13" mb air. Usually need additional context on the same screen.

[plandis]

MacOS has a built in 4x4 window tiling which works for this purpose for me. I don’t find ever wanting more than 4 windows open on an ultrawide. Definitely not as powerful as something like xmonad but useful for the majority of my use cases.

[eru]

Windows also has this kind of tiling built-in. It even comes with default keyboard shortcuts.

[troad]

So does Mac: https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/mac-help/mchl9674d0b0/....

Obnoxiously, it's part of the recent trend of overloading the Globe/Fn key, so it's hard to do with third-party keyboards.

[saagarjha]

Can you not change the shortcut?

[wholinator2]

Here to say ubuntu's got it built in as well

[bobthepanda]

While I don't maximize anything on a monitor that wide, I do appreciate Window's snap to half/quarter functionality for monitors that wide, and I wish Mac had the same ability natively.

[drivers99]

> I wish Mac had the same ability natively

Hover over the green button in the top left of the window. I recently found out about that menu for moving a window between screens, which is also an option it has. (I also just found them in the Window menu if you prefer that. I dont; the options take an extra level of hovering to get to.)

[setopt]

You can also long-click the button instead of hovering. Also, see the menu bar entries related to window management, which replicates these same functions but can be bound to keys in the system settings.

[zadikian]

Option-clicking the green button maximizes it similarly to Windows, rather than going fullscreen. I never used fullscreen just because of the slow animation it used, and now it makes even less sense on my new MacBook with the notch. It basically replaces the menu bar with a blank bar.

[wtetzner]

> Hover over the green button in the top left of the window.

Weirdly it still doesn't quite do what I want. It leaves a gap around the edge of the window for some reason.

[mjcohen]

Damn. Never knew that. TIL

[Brajeshwar]

I will wait for you to discover these Keyboard Shortcuts - Press the `fn + ^` (that globe key + control) and then try `c`, `f`, and all of the four arrow keys.

[girvo]

I’m pretty sure it does? I haven’t installed anything and it has the ability to do half and some other layouts through the window menu and snapping IIRC

[pc86]

I can't speak to the quarters but you absolutely can snap windows to the left and right halves in MacOS.

[dionian]

i do quarters all the time. it used to be with third party apps. iu think its native now

[Bengalilol]

You can hold the 'option' key while dragging a window in order to set it in mosaic mode (you may need to activate the mode in Settings > Finder and Dock > Windows)

[inventor7777]

I'm pretty sure Tahoe added that behavior natively. I personally use Magnet on Sequoia, however, so I am not 100% certain.

[jen20]

This was added as built-in functionality in Sequoia, not Tahoe. Personally I still use Magnet, which has worked well for over a decade and has a few more options.

[nine_k]

I constantly stretch windows to maximum height.

I maximize windows of graphics and video editors.

[wingmanjd]

I just installed Kubuntu last week so I could get the additional shift-drag targets to split my 34" ultrawide into 3 sections, or bump to the edges for the half filled.

[cluckindan]

Install i3wm, it will change your life.

[hombre_fatal]

Something I realized after spending a few months in sway (i3) and then niri is that I only care about a few windows (code editor, terminal, browser, apps I use moment to moment).

All the rest I'd prefer to just summon as-needed and then dismiss without navigating away from the windows I care about.

sway/niri want me to tile every window into some top-level spot.

Took me a while to admit it, but the usual Windows/macOS/DE "stacking" method is what I want + a few hotkeys to arrange the few windows I care about.

[aquariusDue]

Yeah, I came to the same conclusion a few months back. Sadly I had to ditch KDE for GNOME due to an issue[0] specific to NixOS but after going through the gauntlet of tiling window managers and PaperWM/Niri over the years I've also settled on a traditional DE.

[0]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/126590

[yepguy]

I'm surprised to hear that niri didn't work for you, I feel like it's a really good middle ground between tiling and floating window managers. It handles a lot of window resizing and arranging for me, without being too rigid. Windows can have any width they need without having to evenly divide my monitor.

[hombre_fatal]

Niri is a great system for spawning windows.

But it answers the question of:

"Alright, whenever I want the $app window, I just go to column X of workspace Y"

Which isn't something I want for 99% of the windows I have open.

Most of my app interactions are transient where I prefer "summon $app from the ether without navigating anywhere".

For example, here are low priority apps I have open: calendar, discord, whatsapp, notes, journal, database gui.

Niri would make me find a place to put these apps in the top level and then navigate to them which doesn't match their transient nature.

[opan]

In sway, put the lower priority windows in another workspace, or the scratchpad, or in tabs/stacks. You can bind keys to focus specific programs by their appid/class also, so even if they're on another workspace or monitor it'll jump right there.

It sounds like the scratchpad may be especially close to what you want.

[hombre_fatal]

Your sway solutions are hacks around the MRU stack of a stacking desktop environment though.

I don't want to leave the workspace nor go find which tab/stack I've put Spotify just to use it. And scratchpad is no better since I'd have to do an explicit summon/dismiss cycle between workspace and scratchpad just to recreate behavior I already have on a normal desktop env.

[cluckindan]

Maybe awesome-wm would be better for you then.

[setopt]

I’m currently using Krohnkite [1] to get dynamic tiling in KDE, and Klassy [2] to get i3wm-like pixel borders instead of full window decorations.

[1]: https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite [2]: https://github.com/paulmcauley/klassy

[leptons]

Ultrawide without a virtual screen manager is a missed opportunity. Maximize window is still very useful with virtual screen areas on large screens.

[anal_reactor]

Brother, I have 42 inch 16:9 and I always maximize everything.

[al_borland]

macOS only recently got an option to make windows fill the screen. For most of history what most people would assume is a maximize button (the green one) was actually a zoom button. It sized the window to what the OS thought was appropriate for the content (to the best of my knowledge and experience with it).

Apple then made things go full screen, but in a special full screen mode, so macOS worked more like the iPad.

By the time they added a way to maximize windows in the way Windows does, the idea of maximizing an app has largely worked its way out of my workflow. It was always too much trouble, and I find very few apps where it provides much benefit. Web browsers, for example, often end up with a lot of useless whitespace on the sides of the page, so they work better as a smaller window on a widescreen display. In an IDE, it really depends on what’s being worked on and if text wrapping is something I want. Ideally lines wouldn’t get so long that this is a problem.

With the way macOS manages windows, I often find it easiest to have my windows mostly overlapped with various corners poking out, so I can move between app windows in one click. The alternative is bringing every window of an app to the front (with the Dock or cmd+tab), or using Mission Control for everything, neither of which feels efficient.

I could install some 3rd party window management utility, I suppose, but in the long run, it felt easier to just figure out a workflow that works on the stock OS, so I can use any system without going through a setup process to customize everything. It’s the same reason I never seriously got into alternative keyboard layouts.

[hedora]

Note that fullscreen breaks command tab. Create two safari windows (or FF, Chrome, doesn't matter - except that Apple shipped safari, so we'd expect that to be able to render a window to the screen correctly).

Full screen one. Switch to the other. Now, use just cmd-tab and cmd-` to get to the full screen safari window (cmd-` switches between windows in the same application, which is literally never the right thing, but I digress).

For what it's worth, the third party tool 'altTab' mostly fixes this.

Bonus MacOS UI bug: I had to exit altTab to confirm they still hadn't fixed cmd-`. When I re-opened it using cmd-space, finder defaulted to the version in ~/Downloads instead of /Applications, then read me the riot act about untrusted software trying to change accessibility settings.

One more thing: I'm still not using MacOS 26, so all my complaints are about the "last known good" release.

[hbn]

You can double click the grab handle area of a window (which is less obvious than ever in Tahoe) and it'll fill the window to the display.

Except Safari, which just fills out the window's height vertically. Kinda weird to make an exception like that but I don't hate it, because I generally use Safari for reading, and shrinking the browser's width forces lines of text to not get too long if the website's styling isn't setting that manually.

[empressplay]

You can double click on any part of the top title bar (that doesn't have buttons in it) for example in Calendar you can double click beside the magnifying glass in the top right and it will maximize the window.

[al_borland]

This is running "zoom". When I try it in Finder, it doesn't make the window full screen, it actually made it smaller.

When I use the Window menu, Zoom replicates what double-clicking the top title bar does, while Fill maximizes the window. This holds true with the behavior you describe in Safari as well.

It just seems like a lot of apps treat Zoom and Fill the same now (I tried Calendar, Notes, TextEdit, and NetNewsWire), which adds to the confusion.

[ezst]

I don't understand how we keep hearing so often here about Apple OSes being so amazingly simple, approachable and cleverly designed with a lot of attention paid to detail, while every practical productivity advice involves some undiscoverable trick, or combinations of tricks, that seems so arbitrary and obtuse. I don't like Mac, in large parts because of that. No amount of marketing and peer pressure will convince me of the superior elegance and sophistication of something that hates you for wanting windows maximised. Those hidden tricks only add insult to injury as pervasive reminders of your presumed inadequacy, that you need to suffer to have things your way, and that Apple is magnanimous to even let you have them.

[al_borland]

Every system has its issues. It's really a question of which issues you can live with and which system ultimately fits your workflow best.

After I got used to working in windows instead of full screen all the time, I can't really go back. Even on Windows I find myself working the way I do on macOS. Full screening every app made more sense on a 1024x768 screen (or smaller). Once I moved to a widescreen display (which happened to coincide with getting my first mac) running full screen felt like the wrong move most of time.

Web pages would look something like this:

  |     <- whitespace ->     |  <- content ->  |     <- whitespace ->     |
  |                          | Lorem ipsum     |                          |
  |                          | dolor sit amet, |                          |
  |                          | consectetur     |                          |
  |                          | adipiscing      |                          |
  |                          | elit. Morbi     |                          |
  |                          | convallis ante  |                          |

Making the window smaller meant less wasted space and less blinding white space. Once I got used to that idea, it carried over to most other apps.

[ezst]

> After I got used to working in windows instead of full screen all the time, I can't really go back.

Sorry if this comes across as disrespectful, but it smells like Stockholm Syndrome. You are choosing not to use the full extent of your screen estate, and that is your fine choice, but that is no excuse for making it hard. If you compound the whitespace, the thick borders and the generally oversized UI controls, not much of "productive space" remains available to get the work done. I am not interested in macOS as a content-consumption-first vehicle, though that's clearly where Apple is steering.

[somat]

It is situational but I think on a modern wide screen(or screens) if it is a single text-like document(like a web page or a terminal) you want 2 or perhaps 3 side by side. if the app implements it's own window management(like blender) a single full screen is best. Overlapping windows are important to have, but almost never desirable, it usually happens because you ran out of room.

[hedora]

The problem I have with this is that I was using a 1600x1200 21" display in 2000, and got used to workflows for it back then.

I am currently running a 16" display at a similar fractional scaled resolution (because Apple stopped understanding DPI after shipping the first LaserWriter, apparently).

Over that time, my eyes have not gotten better to match display DPI, so I'd rather have web sites just adjust the font size so that there are a reasonable number of words per line instead of rendering whitespace.

Non-full-screen windows would make more sense if Apple supported tiling properly, like most Linux WMs and also modern Windows.

MacOS sort of supports tiling in a "program manager shipped it + got promoted" sort of way, but you have to hover over the window manager buttons, which is slower than just manually arranging stuff. If there are any keyboard shortcuts to invoke tiling, or a way to change the WM buttons to not suck, I have not found them.

[duskdozer]

This is just that things are (poorly) designed now as mobile-only and not even mobile-first.

[chongli]

Apple OSes being so amazingly simple, approachable and cleverly designed with a lot of attention paid to detail

That was the Mac in the 1990s. It was designed for, and highly usable with, a one-button mouse. It didn't have hidden context menus or obscure keyboard shortcuts. Everything was visible in the menu bar and discoverable. The Finder was spatially aware with a high degree of persistence that allowed you to develop muscle memory for where icons would appear onscreen every time you opened a folder.

There was almost nothing hidden or lurking in the background, unlike today (my modern Mac system has 500 running processes right now, despite having only 15 applications open). We've had decades of feature creep since the classic Mac OS, which has made modern Macs extremely hard to use (relatively speaking).

[hbn]

That's... exactly the feature I explained in the comment you replied to

[raydev]

It's been more than 10+ years that I've been able to Option+Click the green button to fill the screen. Works for any app, and always has, unless that app explicitly disallows resizing. That's not recent.

[AlexandrB]

Wow, I learned something new.

Why is it that some of the most useful features in Apple products are impossible to find on your own? I recently also learned about "three finger swipe to undo" in iOS instead of shaking the damn thing like it owes me money.

[otikik]

rectangle [1] is pretty much essential for me because of this. I use only a few keypresses (maximize window, move to one of the halves of the screen horizontally) but that is enough. My mouse very rately interacts with the borders of any window, or those buttons. I had to click on the green one that you mentioned in order to see what it did (yuck).

[1] https://rectangleapp.com/

[achandlerwhite]

by only recently do you mean 15 years ago with Lion?

[al_borland]

Lion got Full screen, but Fill screen came later. Best I can tell, that was in Yosemite, 11 years ago. That still feels relatively recent, as it is in their current California landmarks era and no the big cats era.

[stevage]

I use a third party tool with shortcut keys that cycle between: full height, left half of screen; full height, right half of screen; full height, full width.

It works well for me, makes it easy to get two things side by side without wasting space.

[flomo]

Right, Macs always have had the premise of "spacial window management" (or that's what Siracusa called it), so that's probably how you are 'supposed to' do it.

Full Screen Mode was their answer to maximize, going back many years now (10.7).

[wtallis]

The spatial Finder was something different: having each folder open a new window, and that particular folder's window always re-opening in the same position on screen, with the same window size and same layout of files inside. Having the position of each folder remain consistent and persistent allows you to remember a file's spatial location much as you would for a printed document on a physical desk (exactly where you left it), rather than having to recall its path in the file system hierarchy.

Obviously all of that works better if Finder windows don't usually fill the screen, but it's not a hard requirement.

[flomo]

With the classic OS, all the windows were supposed to work this way. And it seems most apps still do remember their window positions, making it easy to find them. (Expose even keeps the positions consistent when you 'zoom-out'.) Which is why Mac users tend to position their windows rather than relying on alt-tab or the dock or another app-switcher.

(IMO the spacial Finder was designed around floppies and small folders and didn't work so well with hierarchical folder views, so no big loss...)

[massung]

Just wanted to note that this is how I work. I rarely have any window full screen/maximized and hate it when a website or application is built assuming a giant monitor with a maximized window.

I’ve never found a setup with multiple desktops or similar with a way to quickly switch between apps I’m using more than “editor slightly more left, browser slightly more right, …” and just clicking on a border I know brings that app to the front. I’m sure many think I’m crazy. That’s ok. :)

That said, I generally hate the new OSX UI. Every UI element that is non usable just became larger and wastes space I should be able to utilize. Likewise, it made some operations insanely frustrating (here’s looking at you, corner drag resize!).

[doubled112]

Probably not the norm, but I use a large 4K monitor and no scaling.

I haven’t maximized a window in years. They look ridiculous like that. Especially web pages with their max width set so the content is 1/4 the screen and 3/4 whitespace.

[alex_c]

I use a 40” 4K screen.

If I ever accidentally full screen a window, and it’s not in night mode, I am instantly blinded by a wall of mostly white empty background!

[Wowfunhappy]

Do you have the brightness on your monitor set really high or something?

I frequently use macOS on a projector, it doesn't quite fill my wall floor to ceiling but it comes close. I don't use full screen often, but I do it occasionally as a focusing strategy, and it's fine.

[amarant]

Projectors are way easier on the eyes than monitors though.

You're shining a bright light on a wall, which you are looking at.

With a monitor you are shining a bright light at your face, while staring directly at the lightbulb!

[Wowfunhappy]

Doesn't bouncing off the wall just effectively make the "backlight" dimmer? The light reflected off the wall is hitting your face versus the light from the screen hitting your face. It's still light regardless.

If you're using a monitor in the dark the way you use a projector, you should turn the backlight down. If you're using it in a well lit room, the brighter backlight should have less of an effect.

[embedding-shape]

> The light reflected off the wall is hitting your face versus the light from the screen hitting your face. It's still light regardless.

It sounds to me you've never actually looked at a monitor display large swaths of white before, it's brighter than light hitting a wall for sure, even with the brightness down, extra so when the ambient lightning is dark too.

[amarant]

In principle, it's the same as staring at the moon Vs staring at the sun.

The fact that it's bright outside when the sun is up might help, but it's nowhere near enough to compensate!

[amarant]

I too have a huge monitor. How anyone can use one without a tiling window manager is beyond me

[doubled112]

A tiling window manager adds a bunch of keyboard shortcuts I can’t get used to. Not worth the mental load of having things change places on their own either.

It’s probably a me problem, but I’m going to open stuff and then leave it scattered around all day. It’s fine.

I don’t use more than a couple of virtual desktops either. Just one for current tasks and one for background apps.

[ryandrake]

I have three 27" screens (iMac in the center and two thunderbolt displays on each side) and I use most of my "daily driver" applications fullscreen (single monitor). So, things like Xcode, VSCode, web browsers, mail, Quicken, Spreadsheets and Word Processing, and so on. This gives me usually at most 3 things to do at once. Occasionally, for smaller apps, like calculator, messages and so on, I won't fullscreen them. But for my main workflows, it's fullscreen all the way.

My actual biggest pet peeve with this setup is the vast number of web sites that deliberately choose to limit their content to a tiny column centered horizontally in my browser, with 10cm of wasted whitespace on each side.

[amelius]

Without scaling, those rounded corners look not so rounded.

[doubled112]

Computers were better with square corners anyway.

[jiehong]

interesting! But, the default scaling makes them look bigger.

[eightys3v3n]

I've seen half a dozen Mac users and none of them maximized the window very often. They usually had a mishmash of like 12 windows open and randomly all over the screen. Then they used the Alt-Tab to get between them. Basically wherever it opened is where it stayed.

[wmil]

Window management is one thing that MacOS has long been weirdly bad at.

I think there's a conflict between the users who use it on studio displays and users who use it on 13 inch laptops. The Mac team at apple won't pick a side or come up with two solutions.

That's not completely true, they've been pushing swipe between fullscreen apps for a while.

But that doesn't make any sense on an iMac.

So the recommendation from pro users is to use Alfred to manage windows.

[eszed]

This is me. I tend to order projects onto their own desktops[0], each with several app windows open. With an external monitor there's plenty of space, and... Yeah: with command-tab thoroughly committed to muscle memory it usually doesn't matter much if they end up on top of each other. If it does, I'll put them next to each other. Stickies usually go out of my eye-line to the left side of the screen, so I'll keep that otherwise clear.

I sometimes maximize something - other than video calls: those are always full-size - on the laptop screen, but otherwise not at all.

I can see how a full-screen IDE makes sense, but I don't use one, so I always want a couple of terminal sessions running alongside my editor.

There are vanishingly few contexts in which I find full-screen helpful. Not criticizing anyone else, or recommending my way of working, but it's what works for me.

[0] I would like better support for desktop management: naming and shortcutting, particularly. Years ago I tried some (I think it was Alfred, or a predecessor) add-on that promised that, but it was super flaky. Does anything exist that works well?

[cosmic_cheese]

This is me almost exactly. Windows pile up being whatever size feels appropriate, organized only by virtual desktop. If screen #2 is a laptop screen or the program in question is an IDE with a billion panes I might resize it to fill the screen, but otherwise it’s rare. I practically never use full-on fullscreen.

It’s so ingrained I tend to get frustrated on other desktops, which are nearly all built around the Windows mentality of keeping displays filled to the brim with tiled or maximized windows.

Even on the handful of times with maximize/tile on macOS, it’s with a gap of a few pixels of desktop peeking through so it doesn’t feel as “boxed in” and claustrophobic.

[Spunkie]

Maybe this explains some of the bizarre questions I've gotten from mac designers.

The other day I was explaining to one that their designs fixed width looks silly once it got up towards 4k resolutions. But the designers main concern was if people actually used full screen browsers on 4k monitors and if there was any point in thinking about the design at that resolution.

There are plenty of times I enjoy have 2 browsers side by side of even 4 browsers in a square, and being able to do that is one of the benefits of having a 4k monitor. But without a doubt the majority of my time is spent with a full size browser window open, and I observe the same from all the other windows/linux users I manage that use a 4k monitor.

In service of keeping this post simple, I've ignore system display/ui scaling. But still... the question/assumption from the mac designer completely blew my mind.

[Spunkie]

And actually typing that all out just unlocked a bunch of memories about how many times I've been:

    1. On a screen share support call with a mac user
    2. Asked them to pull up a webpage
    3. They pull up a super tiny ass browser window to the point I can't really see anything
    4. I ask them to full screen the browser so we can actually read shit
    5. The mac user just straight up panics or acts like like I've spoken an alien language to them.

The same process happens when I need a mac user to get to an apps settings that on a windows/linux computer would normally be under something like File > Preferences/Settings. They have no idea what I'm talking about or know just barely enough to know they don't remember how to do it and panic.

Then I have to go google it and remember that CMD+comma(⌘+,) exists and reveal it to the mac user like it's actual black magic. And then I immediately forget about it until 6 months later when I need to support a mac user again and I repeat the whole cycle again.

[alpaca128]

On Mac OS Settings is located in the menu named after the program, left of File and Edit. For example Firefox > Settings.

[akdev1l]

Yes MacOS breaks down the user until they give up on window management

[LtWorf]

That's because windows management on osx is terrible.

[karlgkk]

> Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle

The assumption is that the window should be the size of the content of the document inside.

It turns out that this approach works well for many applications, especially what the mac was designed for in the 80s and 90s. And it's horrid for modern "pro" applications.

[donatj]

Bring back the floating toolbars of the early 2000's and it'd be fine.

[daemonologist]

Yes! After many years of using only linux or windows machines, I was assigned an iMac at an internship and noticed the friction with fullscreening things. I decided not to fight it and spent the next year happily working in little windows and making frequent use of the "mission control" gesture.

However, after the internship I went right back to fullscreen/window tiling in linux, so I can't say I really preferred it. Even now as a Gnome user with a big monitor and magic trackpad on my desk - which gives me ~equal access to either approach - I fullscreen everything.

[bombcar]

I don't know what it is, but fullscreen on Mac (even dock-showing "fullish screen") feels wrong in a way that fullscreen on Windows/Linux feels "right".

[cosmic_cheese]

I think it’s partially because on Macs, the desktop has always been a more pivotal component of the OS thanks to ubiquitous drag and drop support and mounted volumes showing on the desktop, among other things. At least for me, it’s not unusual to grab images, text snippets, and other things from apps and drop them on my desktop, making it more of a workbench than it is on other platforms.

Another component is how ability to overlap windows is emphasized, allowing the currently relevant portion of them to be visible without taking center stage or stealing any space from your main window(s).

Both are part of a larger difference in mentality and workflow style.

[freetime2]

I use Rectangle [1] for window management. I only use three shortcuts: full screen, left half of the screen, and right half of the screen. My editors and Chrome are always running in one of these modes.

But for other apps where interactions tend to be brief like Finder, Messages, Notes, Music, etc - yeah I don't usually expand them to full screen.

[1] https://rectangleapp.com/

[paustint]

Exact same for me - but I also use the shortcut to move windows between monitors.

I use cmd+tab and cmd+~ a ton also as I have multiple browser profiles and windows open and usually a few instances of ide with different projects.

And always close tabs with cmd+w and apps with cmd+q to avoid running apps with no visible windows.

I feel super productive with this workflow, never need to fiddle with manual resize.

When someone is screen sharing and they have a bunch of random sized windows it drives me crazy.

[9dev]

Hey, workflow buddy! I do the exact same. I feel seriously handicapped without these shortcuts.

[cpuguy83]

Yeah this is the assumption, even pre-OSX. I won't claim to know the majority of mac users, especially not since the large uptick in the 2010's... but it seems, in my experience, very much the norm to not maximize windows and I wouldn't be surprised if people who do maximize are mostly Windows converts (not that there's anything wrong with that).

[kelnos]

I know lots of people on laptop screens who don't maximize windows. It seems weird to me to only use like 80% of the screen's real estate, but sure, whatever.

On large external monitors, I think it makes total sense not to have every window maximized, though. Probably less usable that way.

[cdaringe]

It’s painful for me to watch senior engineers drag windows around and resize, hunt and peck for what they’re looking for. I suppose that’s what an emacs user may think of me when I move code around, but I suppose such things aren’t critical for overall productivity

[dubya]

I almost never use full screen windows on a Mac. Things like video are full screen, but that's a swipe to another workspace. Half-screen windows on a 27" screen are already bigger than a sheet of letter paper. Lots happens in terminal windows, which vary a bit, but are usually around 100x60, and maybe 1/6 of the screen.

I do have Rectangle installed, so apps generally get at most the left or right half of the screen, with a shortcut for badly behaved websites that need 2/3 to look right. Apps are usually pretty good about remembering window positions, so mostly you futz with it once and you're done.

[jlarcombe]

Actually yes, I have all windows overlapping and none expanded to fill the screen, unless I'm really doing something very specific that needs as much space as possible. But the rounded edges are still slightly annoying.

[peacebeard]

Yes, all the time. I understand that if you have a setup where you do everything in your IDE you could reasonably leave it full screen all the time and I get why that works for some people. I'm not one of those folks and I use separate IDE, terminal, browsers, and other windows and use window management to allow myself to see multiple of them at the same time and switch between them by clicking on what I want.

Also just want to be 100% clear: Tahoe is bad and I hate the changes and I don't think the OS should prefer one way of working over the other. I just hope it's helpful to explain my perspective.

[qingcharles]

I've always disliked MacOS because it is so janky about maximizing windows.

I have a 39" ultrawide and I keep every window maximized. I have OCD about this. I can't stand things all layered on top of each other. I like to focus on one screen at a time.

Chromium browsers have been rolling out split tabs and I use that on a couple of tasks where I'm constantly cutting/pasting between sites, but that's about it.

[moron4hire]

Yeah, anything that has an MDI metaphor going on should be ran fullscreen. Otherwise, what's the point? If the idea is to use the OS desktop space as the application window organizational space, then don't let people make apps that have different document panes.

This goes towards something that I've felt for a little while: at some point in time around the early 2000s, operating system vendors abdicated their responsibility to innovate on interaction metaphors.

What I mean is, things like tabbed interfaces got popularized by Web browsers, not operating systems. Google Chrome and Firefox had to go out of their way to render tabs; there was no support built into the OS.

The OS interfaces we have now are not appreciably different from what we had in the early 2000s. It seems absurd that there has been almost no progress in the last 25 years. What change there has been feels like it could have been accomplished in user-space, plus it doesn't get applied consistently across applications, thus making it feel like not a core part of the OS.

MacOS in particular was supposed to an emphasis on the desktop environment being the space of window and document level manipulation, as exemplified by the fact that applications did not have their own menubars. All application menu bars were integrated together at the top of the screen. Why should it be any different with any other UI organizational feature? Should not apps merely be a single window pane, accomplishing a single thing, and you combine multiple apps together to get something akin to an IDE out of them?

Well, I don't know if they should be. But they can't. Because OS vendors never provided a good means to do it. Even after signalling they wanted it.

[fwip]

I seem to remember Windows XP using tabs in a lot of its settings pages - and possibly earlier versions as well.

[moron4hire]

It did, but those were static tabs. It was pretty easy to create tabs as a form of sub-organization. But the treatment of tabs as documents was new-ish to Chrome/Firefox. Other applications treated multiple, concurrent document views as whole, resizable, sub windows inside of an "MDI" panel.

Look at how older versions of Word, Excel, and Visual Studio worked. The tool trays stay consistant as you move between document windows. The entire application is minimizable and quittable together as one.

Photoshop still uses this metaphor. In the ealry and mid-2000s, Photoshop on Windows had a window for the application separate from the documents, but on Apple OS9 and OSX, the only representation of the application itself was in the menu bar. Document windows and tooltray windows both floated in the same desktop space as every other window.

I haven't checked on the GNU Image Manipulation Program, but I seem to remember it retained the same "no application window, tooltrays and doc windows exist in the DE" metaphor for much longer than Photoshop.

There is also a difference in the way that Chrome renders tabs in the window title area. That's a part of the UI chrome that one would expect to be in the perview of the UI toolkit, but Google took it on themselves.

[anthk]

Virtual desktops in Unix predate Visual Studio. I'm pretty sure there was a concept of tabbed interfaces somewhere in the Amiga or BeOS or any other OS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)

Don Hopkins himself can enlighten us about it (NeWS) better than me literally anyone in this thread, jut wait.

[moron4hire]

What does that have to do with my criticism of the two most popular operating system that they failed to innovate or adapt in areas that showed obvious need?

[kelvinjps10]

I'm not sure if I understood correctly but i3 has tabbed windows and no window titles

[anthk]

Opera had tabs. Tabbed under Unix had tabs. Dillo had tabs. TCL/TK had damn tabs in 1997.

[moron4hire]

Thank you for the additional examples of how the major OS vendors failed to respond to clear need within the market.

[kuschku]

KDE actually had it for many years, until Gnome pushed for CSDs, and with (at the time) CSD-only wayland that feature disappeared.

[joemi]

When I'm using my macbook's screen, I usually expand a browser window to fill the whole screen -- it's a 13" screen so not using the whole thing makes things feel small. But most of the time my computer is plugged into an larger external monitor (20-something inches, maybe 27?), and there I don't expand any windows to fill the whole screen. I like having separate not-full-screen windows which partially (or mostly) overlap.

Somewhat relatedly, we use Windows at work, and it drives me crazy when I hop on a computer after someone's been using it and they have every single thing maximized, even Windows Explorer, on 27" monitors. A maximized browser, I get... I don't do it myself but I understand how it can be useful, but maximizing Windows Explorer is just insane to me, and yet a lot of my coworkers do it.

[piekvorst]

I never have any window in the fullscreen/maximized mode. Some are pretty large, such as IDE, and they sometimes touch one or more edges of the screen/dock/panel, but never occupy the entire space. That was true even on my 14in MacBook with 125% DPI.

That said, I am a huge fan of manual window management.

[stavros]

I hever have any window in fullscreen, but I always have all windows maximized (obviously except the ones that can't be maximized, because of course settings couldn't possibly be made maximizable, what, that's crazy talk).

[Reason077]

It depends very much on the size of the screen. On a small 13” laptop screen? Sure, you’re going to be running apps full-screen a lot of the time. On a big desktop monitor? No, except for games and playing movies, I’ll almost never expand an app to fill the entire screen.

[al_borland]

Last time I had to work on just my laptop screen (16”), I actually found Stage Manager pretty useful. On a larger screen, or for more casual use, I do not.

[jonhohle]

I never understood running apps in full screen. Unless it's an IDE, Video Editor, or some other app with tools filling all nooks and crannies, I want windows that fit the content. I don't want to launch a text or document editor in full screen, read a PDF in full screen. Typically I don't even want to watch a video full screen. I also generally don't want tiling. I want to arrange windows with parts peeking out behind other windows to reference while I'm working on something else. I want some sense of "space" related to where I left a window.

[dwb]

“Maximising” windows full screen, apart from the genuinely-full-screen-takeover mode you can put windows in (where they take a virtual desktop slot too) has never been an idiomatic part of the Macintosh UI, since the beginning. The “zoom” button traditionally meant “toggle between a user defined window size, and a size that is just big enough to avoid scroll bars appearing, where possible”. It goes back to the spatial desktop metaphor.

Personally I try and work with that as much as possible, though it’s not always ideal.

[wryoak]

It’s very rare that I maximize an application. I’m always stacking. However, I don’t think it’s an optimizing assumption: I am frequently fighting with the window manager as I rearrange my windows and it automatically maximizes them because I got too close to an edge of the screen

In general my browser is dead center or slightly to the right so I can access my other windows (terminal, throw away text editor, etc) easily where command tab is insufficient (when I have multiple terminal windows, eg)

[alpaca128]

> I am frequently fighting with the window manager as I rearrange my windows and it automatically maximizes them because I got too close to an edge of the screen

Strange, I constantly get annoyed by how slow and unresponsive the Mac's tiling is when dragging windows to the edge. At the top it has at least half a second delay for no reason. But at least the newest version now has caught up with Windows 7.

[1e1a]

Turn off System Settings -> Desktop & Dock -> Windows -> "Drag windows to menu bar to fill screen"

[barbazoo]

This has always been quintessential Mac for me. First thing I noticed people do on macs much more than PCs was not expanding the windows. Windows are always just floating around. There's no equivalent to the maximize button, it's funny but I don't even know anymore what that "maximize" button on macs does but I remember it's not what I would expect.

[VerifiedReports]

I almost never expand an application to be full-screen, even on my laptop. This despite the fact that I'll resize an application's window to fill the whole screen except for the dock. I think that's why I don't maximize it: I want the dock to remain accessible.

A lot of stupid things about Mac window management stems from the mistake of forcing all applications to share a single menu that's glued to the top of the screen. This essentially turns your entire desktop into ONE application's window, within which its actual windows float around.

Historically this led to the Mac's penchant for apps that spawned an irritating flotilla of windows that you had to herd around your screen. Not only did this deny users a way to minimize the whole app at once, but it also sucked because you could see everything on your desktop (or other apps' UIs) THROUGH the UI of the application you were trying to use. A dysfunctional mess.

Around 15 years ago, I estimate, the huge advantage of a single application window finally permeated the Apple mindset and things have gotten much better in that regard. But Apple should have abandoned the single menu in the transition to OS X, and put menus where they belong: on applications' main frames. That would make the desktop a truly unlimited workspace and eliminate the daily irritation of the menu changes its contents behind the user's back because he clicked on another application's window (perhaps to move it).

Multiple times a day I minimize an application and then attempt to do something in the application that's now filling the screen... only to find that the menu still belongs to the application that isn't even shown. It's just so dumb.

But then... this is the GUI that, for decades, would only let you resize windows from ONE corner and NO edges. Apple grudgingly, half-assedly, and unreliably addressed that in the 2000s, only now to make it even less reliable in the shambolic Tahoe UI.

[stalfosknight]

Maximizing everything whether the document fills the screen or not is very Windows user behavior. macOS is not meant to be used that way.

[pdpi]

I do this on macOS much more than I do on Windows, yes. MacOS flows a lot better if you're willing to adopt its window management style.

As you said, browser and IDE are the big exceptions, plus things like Lightroom or my 3d printer's slicer.

Even VS Code usually lives as a smaller window when I'm using more a text editor rather than as an IDE.

[akdev1l]

The window management style of Mac OS is complete chaos imo

I have been using it for years and I just gave up entirely on managing anything and if I zoom out to see all my windows it looks like the freaking Milky Way from windows I forgot

[mulmen]

In the office I have dual 24" monitors. At home I have a single 38" ultrawide. In desktop mode I almost never have one app taking up my full screen. In portable mode yeah, all full screen. The only exception is IDEs which get their own spaces and are basically self-contained tiling window managers anyway.

[viktorcode]

I use several non-fullscreen windows over desktop. Stage manager makes switching between them very convenient. But I do use full screen windows, they live in their separate spaces. I see no reason whatsoever to maximise any window without it going full screen mode

[sumanthvepa]

I rarely run my apps fullscreen. It's because I have multiple 4k monitors connected to the machine. Using an app even chrome or an IDE fullscreen would be too big.

But do use apps fullscreen when Im traveling. The laptop screen is too small to use chrome or vscode any other way.

[zahlman]

> Does anyone actually do this?

Yes (but not for a browser). My terminal windows are 80x24, pretty much always. I do this today on Linux, I've done it through multiple versions of Windows, and I did it in my childhood on a 9" B&W "luggable" Mac screen.

I just like it, okay?

[brooke2k]

for the longest time I never did this, but then I got a gigantic 4K screen, and I realized that it was almost giving me vertigo having apps like my IDE fullscreened, because I literally have to move my head in order to look everywhere.

so in response I changed my windowing strategy to having a set of windows floating around at exactly the size I want them, and then the advantage of the enormous screen is just how many windows I can have open at once

that being said, I use KDE not MacOS, and 90% of Mac users I'd guess are on laptops, so using this strategy sounds completely insane to me. On laptops I still default to fullscreening or "half-screening" most apps.

[Latty]

People do this, yeah. Even on Windows I've been over someone's shoulder walking them through something and it drives me nuts they work in a tiny window in a random part of the screen.

[wouldbecouldbe]

I exclusive use complete fullscreen mode for apps i'm actively using and on large screens connect the workspaces, on small screen swipe back and forth. So I you never actually use that.

[pico303]

I’ve been using Macs for development for 20 years, and even on a small laptop screen I don’t expand windows to fill the screen. So I guess, yes, there are a few weirdos out there at least?

[matwood]

Consider me another weirdo. I don’t know why anyone would use full screen. Even games I want in a window…

[somat]

It is when the application comes with it's own window manager, blender comes to mind.

[FroshKiller]

I use a MacBook and a Mac mini personally, and I do not generally maximize any application that isn't implicitly a full-screen experience (e.g. a video player or a computer game).

[michael_storm]

Some users switch apps by dragging windows around the screen, like a messy stack. A friend of mine didn't even know about Cmd+Tab to cycle through open apps. Users are weird.

[matwood]

I use a mix of Cmd-Tab and a hot key to see all non-minimized apps (Mission Control?) to pick from. I’ve realized that that I’m faster at seeing the color of the window I’m looking for than remembering the app name.

[crest]

Yes. I think the assumptions are made by people with two displays of at least 32" and ≥4K resolution.

[al_borland]

I think it’s more of a carryover from the original Mac’s in the 80s.

Trying to maximize a window, even 23 years ago when I first moved to OS X, was a completely manual process. It was designed around windows, not walls. And screens were much smaller and lower res back then.

[thesuitonym]

I actually feel the opposite? The current green button action not only makes the window fill the entire screen, it also hides the menu bar AND creates a new virtual desktop and hides all of my other apps. And it seems to me that's what the majority of people want.

Meanwhile, I want to use my graphical, mutli-window preemptive multitasking operating system to, you know, use multiple applications at the same time.

[jiehong]

One issue with windows maximised with the green button is if you have more than 1 window of the same app: you might alt-tab to the app, but cmd-` is not switching to the other window of the same (while id does if not maximised.

[akdev1l]

It does weird things in multi monitor because dragging a window on top of the newly “maximized” window somehow does not work

[RussianCow]

I honestly can't say I've ever seen a non-techie expand a window to full screen using the green button on macOS. I'm not sure why, because in theory, I agree with you.

[thesuitonym]

In my experience supporting Mac users, it's about 50/50. I think a lot of them have been conditioned to not maximize windows because it hides everything else, and they don't understand how to get back to their other windows.

[alpaca128]

I don't maximize windows because it means a 1 second delay, as for some reason Mac OS still does the hardcoded workspace switching animation even for that. Which means entering/leaving fullscreen in a video player is also delayed every time. I don't get it, not even the accessibility settings can disable this waste of time.

[thatfrenchguy]

That’s because you use the button to make them whole screen?

[kccqzy]

I hate maximized windows. I like it when my windows are not maximized but I usually do have significant overlap between windows. Then I switch between windows based on the sliver of window that’s visible even when other windows are in focus. It’s the spatial way of thinking; just like how Finder purists think each folder on your disk should remember its own window size and location so you use your spatial memory to locate Finder windows. I find that this is significantly faster for my brain to process compared to the Windows style where almost all windows are maximized and people use Alt-Tab to switch between windows.

I would in fact say that the culture of not maximizing windows was a small reason why I switched to Mac OS X in the early 2000s.

[alpaca128]

> compared to the Windows style where almost all windows are maximized and people use Alt-Tab to switch between windows

Or just use the taskbar, which is literally made for switching between windows. Or it was, before Microsoft forgot its purpose.

[kccqzy]

Still not my style though. When you close a window, all windows to the right of it in the taskbar get moved leftwards. This breaks spatial memory.

[alpaca128]

You could say the same about the Dock in Mac OS.

[janwirth]

I just use yabai...

[sarmasamosarma]

I never work in full screen. It’s bizarre to me that people do. I don’t need full screen for anything, even Pycharm.

[kogir]

MacOS assumes you won’t full screen every app because all of them ship with large enough, high enough resolution monitors that full screening a single app is a waste of valuable space. Unlike on cheap laptops with 1080p screens.

I suppose you could splurge for a Mac desktop and then get the cheapest, smallest screen possible, but I hope it’s rare.

[alpaca128]

> full screening a single app is a waste of valuable space

Any space not used for the task I'm focused on is wasted. For me the actual problem is that switching apps/windows is too slow because of UI animations.

[LeifCarrotson]

I run 27" 4k and a 34" ultra wide monitors on my desktops, and my main laptop is a P16S with a 16" 3840x2400 OLED typically docked to one of those screens when not on the go, and I almost never use windows that are not snapped to fullscreen or at the very least to halves or quarters. "Large enough" scarcely applies to a MacBook Air or Neo with a 13" display, and I bet a TON of those get docked to cheap 21, 24, and 27" 1080p screens.

I'd like to be able to snap things to the middle third, especially on the ultrawides.

Only little calculator widgets, property panels, and modal dialogs that get immediately closed after use don't get maximized or at least docked to fill some region. I hate the cluttered, layered feeling of having a bunch of non-full-screen windows overlapping, I want to have a dozen apps open and making optimal use of the available display area.

[kellpossible2]

writing this reply on a 13 inch macbook air...

[justonceokay]

I’m not trying to defend because I don’t like it either. But the Mac workflow has always been much more alt-tab focused than windows. With alt-tab and alt-shift-tab (reverse order) I feel like I can fly through my apps at the speed of thought.

Lots of native applications also pop up multiple windows with the expectation that they kind of just float around. But at least in Mac you can scroll on an app that isn’t in focus…