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Comment by claytongulick | Hacker News Reader

Interesting - it's one of the killer features of macos for me.

I use it to compartmentalize stuff I'm working on, and 4 finger swipe between them.

I have a couple instances of VSCode, some app/debugging browser windows, some chrome profile windows etc... all running full screen and I spend my day brush swiping between them.

It may be different for me because I work on a 14" macbook pro, mostly at coffee shops or unusual work locations, so I don't have a large monitor setup. I don't think I'd use it much if I had more of a traditional desk/multimonitor config.

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But you can have workspaces/maximized windows without having the restriction of preventing moving windows to another monitor/workspace that has a maximized window.

I use workspaces on my linux laptops all the time - this 'feature' has existed for ~20 years, and is not hard to implement. The difference being that macos seems to force the restriction of having only 1 window per workspace and not being able to drag a window from one workspace to another. If that's the behaviour you want (one window per workspace), you can easily operate in this way without having the forced restriction.

You can have multiple monitors and multiple workspaces with multiple windows that can be freely moved between monitors and spaces. The only restriction is that when you make a window full screen (not the same as maximizing), it becomes its own new single-occupancy space. You seem to think that making a window fullscreen is the only way to make a new space, but it's just a special case of a larger system that already has the functionality you're asking for.

You're one of the few. Most "pro"-users I know immediately go for 3rd party applications like Rectangle do have a better window-management setup. I never understood how Apple thinks this kind of window management is still OK. It's one of those stupid little Apple quirks like not adding calculator on iOS for so long.

I could definitely see it being more useful on a small screen, especially something like the 12” Macbook.

Generally I’m working at my desk with at least 2x 27” displays. If I’m out somewhere it’s instead 16” MBP + 12.9” iPad with Sidecar.

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