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Comment by rhinoceraptor | Hacker News Reader

If you look at old screenshots of how people used desktop computers [1], it was rare to see fullscreen windows, even on the tiny monitors of the day, and when most people used only a single monitor.

Today, we all have gigantic monitors, many have more than one, but for whatever reason people want to maximize or tile windows. Maybe it's the influence of the fullscreen only, unitasking paradigm from phones and tablet computers, but it just doesn't make much sense to me on a desktop computer.

1: https://anders.unix.se/images/desktop_b_moolenaar.png https://anders.unix.se/2015/10/28/screenshots-from-developer...

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>Maybe it's the influence of the fullscreen only, unitasking paradigm from phones and tablet computers, but it just doesn't make much sense to me on a desktop computer.

Completely the opposite. It's the influence of having computers powerful enough to have massive multitasking. Arranging windows like papers on a desk is easy when you have a handful of simple programs and a couple of browser windows - it's very different when you have 100 tabs with their own task-swapping logic in front of 20 other programs. You've already lost easy swapping so you might as well gain the extra pixels.

Windowing was a core part of classic MacOS applications, the application was decoupled from its windows, since the application was a composition of windows. It's very different from the MS Windows or tablet UI paradigms where an application and its main window are the same thing.

For example, Photoshop, your photo document was contained in a window, your tool palettes were windows, etc. If you were viewing a reference image, you could have that open in a separate window alongside the image you were working on, rather than having to switch tabs or switch windows.

What is “massive multitasking”? Any modern OS since the 2000s has been running hundreds of processes.

I keep my browser fullscreen because websites usually break (read: horizontal scrollbars, or ridiculously narrow columns for content) or go into a mobile view if I don't.

I keep my terminal (read: text editor) fullscreen because then I have enough horizontal space to have two panes open next to each other (sometimes with an additional directory viewer to the left).

99% of the time, I'm in the terminal or the web browser. I don't understand what I would gain from not maximizing them, but I do understand what I would lose.

Can you name a website which does this? I use everything except games and my IDE in windowed on different machines and I have never experienced this problem in 10+ years of doing so. It can only happen if you make the browser window extremely narrow.

If you're not using a tiling window manager, maximizing windows that do their own tiling (e.g., tmux, Emacs, vim, iTerm, Konsole... whatever) is the only thing that makes sense.

If you're visually impaired, you'll also likely find yourself needing to maximize because all of the blank space used in modern design trends means that if you scale up the app or the font sizes, all that empty space the app is burning up forces you to maximize the window just to fit the important elements on the screen.

It’s also the influence of “padding:200px” on all websites. Apple taught that whitespace meant design, so a screen barely fits 10 words today.

https://appfire.com/ as an example, but I’m always flummoxed how ALL wordpress themes cap at 10 words per line of text in the body of the blogs, and 25cm of white blank on either side (10 inches).

I need a bigger screen.

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