Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

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On one hand that reason makes sense, but on the other hand I never found that to be a problem when using menus attached to windows. I need to aim for buttons in the middle of the screen all the time, and that's not slower just because the mouse doesn't bounce against a screen edge. I also hardly find myself actually bouncing against the screen edge when using macOS menus.

IMHO the bigger problem on Mac is the weird 'application centric' window system behaviour instead of the much more intuitive 'window centric' behaviour of Windows (and most Linux desktops).

For instance, "Alt-Tab" flips through applications on macOS, and it's possible for applications to be running even though they have no windows open, and in that case they just present a "naked" menu bar which I find utterly confusing. The whole thing feels like a dead-end UX experiment from the early 90's.

I'm mostly using the "3-finger-swipe" on macOS now to directly pick a window instead of tabbing though, but the main reason for that is not that it's better, it's just better than the weird macOS Alt-Tab behaviour.

PS: this sounds like I just switched from Windows to Mac, but I made that switch more than a decade ago, and it still feels "wrong" ;)

The issue with window-centric behavior, I find, is that lacking the logical grouping of application-based, it scales badly. Alt-tab for example becomes increasingly unusable as the number of open windows increases.

The fact that the taskbar has grouped windows by applications by default since XP/Vista hints at this scalability problem, with the taskbar quickly getting similarly unusable without the grouping.

This is mitigated via workspaces. Not sure how Win/Mac does it, but that's how I work on Linux desktops.

Works reasonably well on Windows: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/multiple-desktop...

I can never remember the (easy) shortcuts so this is helpful: https://learn.microsoft.com/da-dk/windows/powertoys/shortcut...

From PowerToys: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

(Which also have the (in this context) useful FancyZones)

PowerToys with WindowWalker ( https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/powertoys/run#wind... ) is what I do use a lot to search through windows - I have a lot of terminals open usually, could be like 30-40 spread across virtual desktops and searching one specific based on server name it's connected too saves me some time.

Back in a days when Virtual Desktops were not that handy (technically those available since win2000 if I recall correctly), I've used Blackbox for Windows and my own homemade program to quick search though all PuTTYs (written in VB6 + Winapi). Now I don't need it anymore :)

Alt tab stays half-usable forever because it shows windows in MRU order.

I see your point but is firmly on "team window". I feel the scalability problem is better solved with multiple desktops. My work is rarely in one application so grouping based on work context is a better fit for me.

This can work really well even on MS Windows. It is unfortunately not default nor obvious to the regular user. But what comes in the box sprinkled with a PowerToy is rather good.

That is the paradigm I strongly prefer.

I have always liked the tight integration on Mac (such as printing - no driver fuss) and the UI looks really sleek. But the UX of the window/app handling does not sit well with me. Not for the lack of trying.

My first GUI was GEM Desktop which might have damaged me for life.

Probably just boils down to differences in mental models but the Windows implementation of workspaces makes the problem even worse in my opinion, since without per-app grouping on the OS level there’s no way to see or manage all windows of a particular program across workspaces unless implemented by each individual app.

nah, the alt-tab behavior on osx is just wrong, so I use contexts.app which fixes it.

About this we agree.

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