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Comment by kitsunesoba | Hacker News Reader

The idea behind macOS window management is to not manage windows at all, instead letting them exist at sizes that fit their content in whichever position they land on your desktop, stacking and overlapping like papers on a desk, letting relevant bits peek through without requiring the entirety of their host windows being visible. Exposé/Mission Control are there when a window gets lost, and virtual desktops are meant to partition window groups by task further reducing the need to manually manage windows.

It's basically the polar opposite of something like a Linux tiling WM and it's quite different from Windows, where it's the norm to maximize everything.

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This is true.

Which is what is so bizarre about it. Everything else about Apple is about cleanliness, focus, minimalism, simplicity.

Yet the windowing system is designed so that everything's overlapping, it's hard to pick out your foreground window from 20 other background windows of varying shapes and sizes and positions, and bringing up Expose/Mission Control shows you something like a detective's corkboard as he tries to connect the dots to solve the case of the serial killer.

It's quite jarring when the rest of the Apple aesthetic is clean minimal lines, and then your windows are this separate universe where it looks like a three-year-old tossed rectangles all over the place and never cleaned up after themselves.

Well, it is simplistic from a certain point of view. If we rewind to the mid-to-late 80s with the Lisa and original Mac, which do you think most users at that point would find more simple and natural: windows that act as analogues of physical papers on a desk, or windows that have no real life equivalent and resize to fill empty space under arbitrary conditions?

Granted, that was ~40 years ago and things are different now, but you can see where the roots of the idea trace back to, and the idea probably has some level of relevance even today. As noted in my other comment, on Windows users often opt out of window management entirely by maximizing everything because it's simpler.

> it's hard to pick out your foreground window from 20 other background windows

This is mostly a casualty of two things: first, the flat UI epidemic which stripped contrast from UIs and made active/inactive windows states less distinct from each other and second, the proliferation of web/Electron apps which for the most part do not implement inactive states for controls at all.

If you boot up a Mac running the last non-flat OS version (10.9 Mavericks) and do work on it with entirely native apps, you'll find that the active window is very visibly active and background windows are very visibly inactive.

My main issue with this workflow is that if I alt tab to terminal, then it brings all of the terminals to front, rather than the one I wanted. Now one inactive terminal may be blocking the previous app that I want to use as reference for my active terminal. The only workaround is to resize and drag all the terminals around which I usually don't want to do. So I have to make the previous app fullscreen to move it to a separate window and then suffer from the slow window animation. It's just the worst UI ever designed. Never had any such issues with default ubuntu or windows. Things actually feel like a real desk(top) on those.

It sounds like you're maybe not using virtual desktops, in which case I would strongly suggest giving that a try. Moving windows between desktops is faster than switching to/from fullscreen and in many circumstances you can have just one terminal window per virtual desktop windows makes it easy to command-tab to.

The other thing I tend to do is to keep the windows I'm actively using peeking out to click on to foreground which sidesteps the issue of command-tab foregrounding all windows.

Virtual desktops in MacOS are still only partially implemented though.

Vastly better than Windows (unless 11 has decided to fix them), but grouping windows together in a new desktop involves swiping up, clicking the plus to create a new desktop, dragging both windows to the new desktop. Control left/right to move between the desktops, oh that terminal would be useful as well, and find that there is no native shortcut to move windows between desktops.

Mission Control is the quickest way to find the window you want amongst many. It has a dedicated keyboard key (F3), but you can also set it to a hot-corner so it's a quick mouse move away. There's also a "show all application windows" command that has a keyboard shortcut and can also be set to a hot corner.

You absolutely do not need to resize and drag windows around manually to find the one you want!

> it's hard to pick out your foreground window from 20 other background windows of varying shapes and sizes and positions

I’d argue this probably means you have too many windows open. Part of the abstraction for macOS programs is that the program isn’t the window, and vice versa. You can close all of a program’s windows without closing the program itself. This frees you up to close windows willy-nilly and know that you can just open them back up again if you need to. Keep just what you need for the current task-at-hand open on your desktop and close everything else.

Personally, I’ve actually been using Stage Manager, which takes rapid-unitask- switching toward its maximum level. Just one app open on each screen at a time. Other windows hanging out in-sight, but not cluttery. Switching’s just a click away, and of course all the keyboard shortcuts work nicely, too.

It's a great way to waste both the screen real estate and the user's attention.

MacOS has a number of interesting features in the kernel, and it has a reasonably good and highly uniform UI, with global shortcuts and all. But its window management is insufferable.

Good thing there are utilities that try to help that. (I already forgot which, I handed back my last work-provided MBP in 2018.)

Most users of macos are fullscreen users. End of. Power users can find and write power user solutions.

That seems like a bold statement. I know a loooot of macOS users (myself included) and none of us ever use fullscreen.

Without some kind of data in hand, it's anecdotal either way, so I figured I'd throw my hat in.

Only in that they resize the window to be kind of but not really full screen. That’s what all of the less technical Mac users I know do. I’ve never seen them go full screen with the green button

I found Amethyst helped fix a bunch of sharp edges, but it's not perfect because it is still fighting the system.

> it's quite different from Windows, where it's the norm to maximize everything.

Where did you get this idea? It's definitely not the norm and MSFT supports an excellent tiling window system: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzon...

Even without that utility though, it's easy to snap windows to one side or another of a monitor - particularly useful for ultra widescreen monitors

Based on seeing how most longtime Windows users use Windows. I rarely see tiling used, it’s almost always maximizing. Even on gigantic monitors and web pages with an 800px central column, they maximize.

The Windows users I encounter IRL tend to not be particularly technical though so that may bias things.

I personally get some usage out of tiling but as mentioned in another comment the tiling proposal triggers in W11 are over sensitive and kind of annoying.

I think that’s generally what you want because having other windows visible would not only take space away from the application you’re using but also be distracting

I might actually try that for a while, but I doubt I can get used to it.

My use cases almost always want the maximum available vertical space. Every window that scrolls, I want as large as possible in that direction. But, on the other hand, I can see how smaller overlapping windows would leverage spatial memory for faster switching.

> It's basically the polar opposite of something like a Linux tiling WM

It's basically an over-engineered Gnome, where some features like side by side windows there was a red line by UX and someone worked around the law to "sort of" offer the option.

Having used GNOME (and actually, running it on a couple of machines right now), I think macOS is at least a step or two above “overengineered GNOME”, because GNOME itself is basically what you’d get if you asked someone to turn iPadOS into a desktop OS. It feels considerably more restrictive than macOS does.

GNOME has a lot of features that macOS is missing by default, like dragging windows anywhere by holding a key, compose key support, per-app volume mixing, and searching through open windows as you type.

In what ways do you feel that GNOME is more limited than the macOS desktop?

There’s a ton of little power user affordances sprinkled through macOS that aren’t present in GNOME, and some not in any other desktop environment.

Here’s just a few shortcomings compared to macOS pulled from memory and from playing with my GNOME install for a few minutes just now:

- No built in UI to remap modifier keys

- Disinclination towards menubars, with any functions that don’t fit on the toolbar or in the hamburger menu getting trimmed

- No ability to search menu items for an app-agnostic command palette

- No ability to assign/remap key shortcut for any menu item, including in third party apps

- No desktop icons without extension

- No per-virtual-desktop wallpapers

- Dash can’t be pinned to left or right edges

- Files and folders can’t be pinned to the Dash

- Overview can’t group windows by application, making it impossible to move all window of an app between desktops at once

- Minimize and zoom/maximize buttons are hidden without GNOME Tweaks

- All windows for an app can’t be closed, minimized, restored, or zoomed all at the same time

- No option in settings to change UI accent color

- Frequently accessed control center sections can’t be dragged out and made top-level items

- File manager obscures root filesystem and other partitions

- GNOME apps don’t allow user to customize toolbars unlike native Mac apps

If I really drilled there’d probably be enough to fill a blog post.

This is a good reply. I say you should write the blog post!

It's been some time since I used vanilla GNOME, so I don't know how much of what I recall about GNOME applies to the latest vanilla experience.

The main one of those I'd miss or reach for is menu bar searching. That's probably my favorite feature of macOS!

> No ability to assign/remap key shortcut for any menu item, including in third party apps

I suspect there's not a good way for GNOME to offer this, unfortunately. Menu bar implementations are multiple on Linux, not singular like on macOS.

> Minimize and zoom/maximize buttons are hidden without GNOME Tweaks

That is absolutely wild. All the time? Until mouseover?

Sorry for neglecting other items! They do sound potentially annoying, but don't stick out to me as much as the things I replied about.

> That is absolutely wild. All the time? Until mouseover?

All the time, normally only the close button is visible. I can kinda see the reasoning for hiding minimize since GNOME lacks a representation of minimized windows (except in overview), but I can’t figure out a good reason to hide maximize.

That’s what I’ve thought, but why would I not want my browser, editor, or any other work app full screened? If hit the green button to make it a work space, it handicaps functions like swipe up

Personally I never want browser or editor windows to be fullscreened unless I’m working on a tiny screen like on the 12” MacBook Air or maybe 12” Macbook. On anything larger doing that makes for tons of blank space that could be used for other relevant windows or at letting my desktop peek around the edges.

IDEs on the other hand I like having fill my screen because of all their editors and panes, but I still don’t use actual fullscreen but rather option-click the green button which resizes the window to fill the desktop without actually going fullscreen.

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