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Comment by joleyj | Hacker News Reader

> “every app can be command tabbed to and therein each app has its own subwindow management”

This is so, so annoying. Your Mac app’s window is minimized? No alt-tab for you!

Just don’t minimize the window. Removing a window from the alt-Tab list is basically the only reason to minimize it in the first place on Mac. (Not reflexively minimizing windows does take some time to get used to if you’re coming from Windows, admittedly.)

Macs must have some strange workflows that that's the only use for minimizing...

I regularly minimize some applications when I want to focus on others.

you can use workspaces for that. for comparison, gnome on linux doesn't even support minimizing windows any more. you move windows/apps that you don't want to use right now to a different workspace.

You can also hide an entire application rather than minimizing specific windows. It'll unhide when you switch back with cmd-tab.

gnome does do minimization fine but it's in the tweak tools. probably the first thing I change setting up a new system

Minimization on Mac is essentially a legacy feature. There’s rarely any reason to use it.

On Windows there are applications that minimize to the tray instead of remaining on the task bar. That’s my most common reason to minimize, so that it disappears from the task bar when not in use.

Just CMD+TAB to your required app, then hit ↓ arrow and you get access to all your windows. Minimised windows appear at the bottom of the screen.

WindowMaker under GNU/Linux and BSD was like that too...

But, OFC, both WindowMaker and Mac OSX come from the same NeXT grandaddy...

well, windowmaker only copied the style, so it's more like a reverse adoption, not a descendant.

Not just that, even if Wing Is Not GNUstep. It was built to host tons of GNUStep applications and their behaviour.

i have used WindowMaker but also the original NeXTstep for years, and WindowMaker's integration with GNUstep apps and its emulation of the NeXTstep interface always felt incomplete.

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