Since the first taste of Linux WMs, I believe the best and only good way of handling window move and resize is super+lmb/rmb respectively. No more pixel-perfect header/corner sniping!
Recently getting a new Mac for work, coming from Hyprland has been tough, but I feel like I’m getting there. Aerospace and Karabiner-Elements have gotten me most of the way there. Have had to write a few scripts to get the workspaces working the way I’m used to, but overall I got a significant part of my workflow to mirror my Linux setup, but would still love to get the super+right click to resize working somehow (there is a native way to move windows with ctrl+cmd+left click which was nice).
garciansmith 23 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, it was one of those things I noticed when I first started using Linux and wondered why every other OS didn't just copy it.
cosmic_cheese 6 minutes ago [-]
Probably just simple resistance to use of modifier keys in non-technical users, at least on the Windows side. A lot of users never touch a modifier except for Ctrl for copy/paste and maybe Windows for start menu search.
On the Mac side where key combos and modifier use is more widespread among users, it’s probably because there’s no intuitive visual that can be associated with the interaction.
learn_more 1 hours ago [-]
>In total the thickness went down from 7 to 6 pixels, which is a 14% decrease, making it 14% more likely to miss it.
Pedantic, but chance of miss is actually less than 14% more likely since the user's click location is not uniformly random over the thickness area, it's biased toward the center (normally distributed).
dagi3d 25 minutes ago [-]
I had similar thought but didn't want to be that guy.
trashcan 2 minutes ago [-]
Oh, this is probably related to why I cannot resize "live caption" windows at all on the latest version of MacOS. They have been mucking around with resizing and not testing it well.
neodymiumphish 1 hours ago [-]
I’ve tried many apps for window resizing on Mac, and none feel like they’re nearly as good as FancyZones (the PowerToys module for Windows). I don’t want secret squirrel key combos. I don’t want hot corners.
I want two things:
- Predefined zones à la FancyZones
- Tied edges (there’s surely a better term for this) so that I can grab the edge between two apps and have them both resize together (one gets smaller as the other gets bigger).
Please someone tell me this exists without a subscription!
joedrago 60 minutes ago [-]
I think for preexisting solutions, the "best" one is Rectangle Pro, but it isn't free, so maybe that doesn't count. That said, eventually I realized I don't even want the whole "window split" stuff and I'd prefer to just have a few keybinds that throw windows into specific coords on my screens, so I installed Hammerspoon (free) and wrote a screen's worth of Lua to do this for myself. It is written for my two adjacent 1440p monitors and personal preferences, but the code is really obvious so if you're comfortable with making your own bespoke solution, this is pretty nice, and free.
I like powertoys but it’s taking 1.17Gig of space. That should be illegal
dgxyz 59 minutes ago [-]
It's bad when stock Gnome is better. That's where I am now.
accrual 52 minutes ago [-]
Switched to KDE Plasma last month and very pleased I can have square-corner windows again.
krisknez 23 minutes ago [-]
I had a hard time with Gnome but now I got used to it and it's amazing for me. I just can't believe they still haven't implemented scrolling speed setting...
dgxyz 52 minutes ago [-]
Corners are great aren't they! :)
jazzyjackson 19 minutes ago [-]
I love gnome, at least how it's implemented by recent Fedoras. Whenever I go back to Mac I wonder why spotlight and mission control are two different functions
xvxvx 1 hours ago [-]
I’m a Windows guy, but was given a MacBook for my current job. Fair enough. But I laugh at how horrendous such a simple thing as resizing windows is. Want Slack to take up the right third of a screen then fill the rest with browser? In Windows, it takes 2 seconds. Not on Mac. I have to resize the window myself? There’s no auto-snap?
I’m sure someone will buzz in with some hidden way to do it. ‘Hold cmd-shft-9 then say these magic words and voila!’ No. Dragging the window with the cursor should suffice.
Edit: I’ll also add that having to buy a huge $200+ display adapter so you can connect 2 external monitors to a MacBook, whereas a slimline $30 device will do the same for Windows laptops, is total bullshit.
akersten 36 minutes ago [-]
Yeah window management and the desktop experience in general on Mac just feels like I'm dragging my hands through tar.
For example, "open two file browsers, navigate to $home in one and $downloads in the other, move and rename a few files between them" is a 10 second task on Windows (Win+E x2, quick clicks on the explorer links, easy to scroll around, move files, drag, rename, anything you want). On Mac I get about 7 system ding sounds and Finder windows bugging off the side of my screen while simultaneously deciding the best way to show downloads in a list is alphabetically and with 256x256 tiled icons. It's just an indescribably bad and slow experience to do any kind of file management on Mac.
Another example. Take a screenshot and quickly redact some info with a black box. Easy on windows that I can type it out exactly (win+s, drag box, win key "paint" enter control v box tool save boom). On Mac?? After command shift 4 to take a screenshot I think it's actually physically impossible to edit it within 60 seconds.
sneak 26 minutes ago [-]
> After command shift 4 to take a screenshot I think it's actually physically impossible to edit it within 60 seconds.
This is completely incorrect, and the solution is way more discoverable than needing to know obscure things like Win+E. Click the thumbnail that appears in the bottom right, then click the marker icon.
> For example, "open two file browsers, navigate to $home in one and $downloads in the other, move and rename a few files between them" is a 10 second task on Windows (Win+E x2, quick clicks on the explorer links, easy to scroll around, move files, drag, rename, anything you want).
Similarly, if you know the platform-specific shortcuts, this is less than 10 seconds on macOS. Click finder in dock, hit Command-N twice for new windows, drag each window to one of the L/R edges of the screen to tile, click downloads in the sidebar on one, click the home icon/username in the sidebar on the other.
noduerme 11 minutes ago [-]
The bottom right thumbnail thing really bugged me and confused me when it came out, because I always just want the screenshot on the desktop right away, as it used to be. I don't know why they couldn't have the delay/thumbnail AND put the file somewhere I could reach it immediately. But IIRC, there is some setting that disables the thumbnail behavior and lets the file be written instantly.
dagi3d 27 minutes ago [-]
you can edit the image with preview any time you want
egypturnash 1 hours ago [-]
Double-clicking the edge or corner of a window (anywhere a double-headed arrow cursor shows up) will resize it to the edge of the screen.
Hovering over the green dot in the title bar will bring up some simple window tiling options.
This does require displays to have separate spaces though!
jazzyjackson 22 minutes ago [-]
Also takes 2 seconds... You don't need 3rd party apps like everyone's saying, only if you want tiling or to copy Windows behavior.
Press Control-Up Arrow (or swipe up with three or four fingers) to enter Mission Control, drag a window from Mission Control onto the thumbnail of the full-screen app in the Spaces bar, then click the Split View thumbnail. You can also drag an app thumbnail onto another in the Spaces bar.
The defaults in every OS are set made for power users (i.e. anyone doing more than browsing the web and using office).
With Windows you need to remove most of the cruft, Mac is no different; most people are using some combination of Raycast, Rectangle, Alfred, etc...
Someone1234 16 minutes ago [-]
On Windows you have to change a few settings, on Mac you're suggesting all third-party software to manage core functionality. Apples Vs. oranges.
I mean, yes, Windows has PowerToys which is an installed add-on, but on Mac we're not talking about Mac Vs. PowerToys, Mac isn't even competing with basic Windows features. PowerToys is competing with the PAID third-party software for Mac.
thesh4d0w 1 hours ago [-]
I'm also struggling with a macbook for work, but hold your mouse over the green circle in the top left for a few seconds and it'll pop up. (You don't get the nice snapping that windows does though)
vesrah 56 minutes ago [-]
Holding option while hovering gives you more placement / sizing options too. If you click and drag a top bar to the right or left it'll snap to the right or left half of the screen. Dragging it to the top or double clicking will snap it to full size. Dragging to corners will snap to quarter.
lsbussell 40 minutes ago [-]
I don’t see options for thirds, though. Even on an UltraWide monitor.
universenz 30 minutes ago [-]
tHaTs BeCaUsE wE dOn’T SeLL wIdE ScReeN DiSpLaYs YeT! -Apple Genius
rv3392 43 minutes ago [-]
I've been using Rectangle (https://rectangleapp.com/) for years now. IMO the shortcuts actually make it a massive improvement over Windows.
iamflimflam1 24 minutes ago [-]
Sorry to be that guy who buzzes in - I might be missing something, but don't you just mouse over the green button?
jezzamon 34 minutes ago [-]
The answer, unfortunately, is to install a 3rd party program. Once you do that, it works well enough
behnamoh 40 minutes ago [-]
Raycast does it. You need Raycast anyway; spotlight sucks.
FireBeyond 45 minutes ago [-]
Rectangle Pro.
I'm actually agreeing with you. You shouldn't have to resort to third party apps.
1 hours ago [-]
ggm 7 minutes ago [-]
This is a design flub which we are told Jobs simply wouldn't have let out the door. The Jobs who made people shave 50ms off boot times. The Jobs who demanded the no button mouse.
I get the cult of Steve is a bit oversold but the proprietor liked to check the finish on the car rolling out the end of the line and if his fingers felt a rough edge on a panel he had no compunction stopping the production line to find the problem. The current generation have a bit too much "fixed in post" going on.
staplers 1 minutes ago [-]
"Fixed in post" meaning fixed in version XX.00.2 now. Fire QA and use community feedback seems standard now.
badc0ffee 10 minutes ago [-]
Doesn't the cursor change into a pair of <-> arrows when you hover over the clickable area?
akersten 5 minutes ago [-]
Only for the currently focused window which is inexplicably weird
2bitencryption 28 minutes ago [-]
The interesting part, for anyone who actually reads the article - the change was fixed in an RC and then reverted in the final release.
Which implies there was some regression, some issue, some incorrect behavior or negative impact. One has to wonder… what could it have been? What could the issue with having a more accurate clickbox for the corner of the window possibly be?
anematode 16 minutes ago [-]
Maybe it was just an oversight in the merge process? e.g. the diff was applied only to the RC and not to the release branch? idk
urbandw311er 57 minutes ago [-]
You have to wonder what’s actually going on under the hood when the curve of the hitbox is different to the curve of the window? I’m very curious to understand how Apple have got to this point.
sho_hn 50 minutes ago [-]
This is relatively common. The mouse interaction code doesn't necessarily look at the visual asset, and in many UI toolkits the ability to have interaction targets located and sized differently from visual features is a feature.
_def 1 hours ago [-]
I miss resizing windows with alt+right click
matja 33 minutes ago [-]
Did macOS support that at some time in the past?
I've used Linux as my daily OS for 20 years and got so used to alt-right resize and alt-left drag that the macOS and Windows way of actually needing to move my mouse to the corner or edge of a window feel almost barbaric in comparison.
I still have found no way free equivalent on macOS.
Lucasoato 1 hours ago [-]
Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave.
dham 4 minutes ago [-]
Mac has always had horrible window management. Made worse because applications and windows are a separate concept. Used to seem clever but in the world of multiple workspaces it's a terrible decision. Now it's even worse trying to manage multiple llms and projects.
Nextgrid 41 minutes ago [-]
Attach a generator to him and the AI datacenter energy needs are solved. Even better, the more trash like this that AI produces the more energy is generated.
GaryBluto 36 minutes ago [-]
> Even better, the more trash like this that AI produces the more energy is generated.
Do you have any "inside knowledge" that this was caused by LLM use or do you just attribute everything you don't like to AI?
jasondigitized 36 minutes ago [-]
Rectangle Pro for the win
MBCook 48 minutes ago [-]
Trying to get Liquid Glass to work is such a clown show. Incredible.
The UI wasn’t perfect before. It’s slowly been getting worse with each of their dumb updates to make it look more like iOS over the years.
What we’re forced to use now is just a joke. Ignoring all the visual design issues they can’t even make basic stuff fully functional.
kyralis 15 minutes ago [-]
The worst part is that Liquid Glass isn't even good on iOS.
4b11b4 1 hours ago [-]
Haven't resized a window with a mouse since using aerospace
receperdogan 27 minutes ago [-]
finally
refulgentis 1 hours ago [-]
Many moons ago, I invented* a rule that "you can always make people feel what you want about a #. either use percentages where they don't make sense, or whole numbers when a percentage does"
I hear it when I read 7 px -> 6 px means 14%(!!!!) less likely to find the horizontal/vertical only drag area.
Fitts's Law is logarithmic, not linear, and at these sizes the dominant factor is whether the target is discoverable at all, not its sub-millimeter width. "14%" smuggles in precision that doesn't exist in the underlying motor reality; it takes an imperceptible physical change and launders it through a ratio with a small denominator to produce a number that feels alarming. You could just as honestly say "we moved the edge by 0.097 mm**" and nobody would blink.
* I think? It feels like there'd be prior art on this
**
ppi = 262
inch = 1/ppi
mm = inch \* 25.4
# 1px ≈ 0.097 mm ≈ 0.004"
learn_more 55 minutes ago [-]
14% over estimates it because the user isn't clicking with uniform randomness, their clicks are normally distributed about the center of the line.
Rendered at 01:43:10 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/qv0vmz/missing_supe...
On the Mac side where key combos and modifier use is more widespread among users, it’s probably because there’s no intuitive visual that can be associated with the interaction.
Pedantic, but chance of miss is actually less than 14% more likely since the user's click location is not uniformly random over the thickness area, it's biased toward the center (normally distributed).
I want two things:
- Predefined zones à la FancyZones - Tied edges (there’s surely a better term for this) so that I can grab the edge between two apps and have them both resize together (one gets smaller as the other gets bigger).
Please someone tell me this exists without a subscription!
* https://www.hammerspoon.org/
* https://gist.github.com/joedrago/bfc54f4083b070fe998d519cc6c...
I’m sure someone will buzz in with some hidden way to do it. ‘Hold cmd-shft-9 then say these magic words and voila!’ No. Dragging the window with the cursor should suffice.
Edit: I’ll also add that having to buy a huge $200+ display adapter so you can connect 2 external monitors to a MacBook, whereas a slimline $30 device will do the same for Windows laptops, is total bullshit.
For example, "open two file browsers, navigate to $home in one and $downloads in the other, move and rename a few files between them" is a 10 second task on Windows (Win+E x2, quick clicks on the explorer links, easy to scroll around, move files, drag, rename, anything you want). On Mac I get about 7 system ding sounds and Finder windows bugging off the side of my screen while simultaneously deciding the best way to show downloads in a list is alphabetically and with 256x256 tiled icons. It's just an indescribably bad and slow experience to do any kind of file management on Mac.
Another example. Take a screenshot and quickly redact some info with a black box. Easy on windows that I can type it out exactly (win+s, drag box, win key "paint" enter control v box tool save boom). On Mac?? After command shift 4 to take a screenshot I think it's actually physically impossible to edit it within 60 seconds.
This is completely incorrect, and the solution is way more discoverable than needing to know obscure things like Win+E. Click the thumbnail that appears in the bottom right, then click the marker icon.
> For example, "open two file browsers, navigate to $home in one and $downloads in the other, move and rename a few files between them" is a 10 second task on Windows (Win+E x2, quick clicks on the explorer links, easy to scroll around, move files, drag, rename, anything you want).
Similarly, if you know the platform-specific shortcuts, this is less than 10 seconds on macOS. Click finder in dock, hit Command-N twice for new windows, drag each window to one of the L/R edges of the screen to tile, click downloads in the sidebar on one, click the home icon/username in the sidebar on the other.
Hovering over the green dot in the title bar will bring up some simple window tiling options.
https://support.apple.com/guide/macbook-air/manage-windows-o... has more to say on the subject, more recent versions of the OS than I use have added more stuff in this vein, personally I just use Moom and have been for years.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-window-tilin...
It reads like a parody.
There is also this option you can enable to drag windows around when holding a shortcut: https://petar.dev/notes/drag-windows-on-macos/
With Windows you need to remove most of the cruft, Mac is no different; most people are using some combination of Raycast, Rectangle, Alfred, etc...
I mean, yes, Windows has PowerToys which is an installed add-on, but on Mac we're not talking about Mac Vs. PowerToys, Mac isn't even competing with basic Windows features. PowerToys is competing with the PAID third-party software for Mac.
I'm actually agreeing with you. You shouldn't have to resort to third party apps.
I get the cult of Steve is a bit oversold but the proprietor liked to check the finish on the car rolling out the end of the line and if his fingers felt a rough edge on a panel he had no compunction stopping the production line to find the problem. The current generation have a bit too much "fixed in post" going on.
Which implies there was some regression, some issue, some incorrect behavior or negative impact. One has to wonder… what could it have been? What could the issue with having a more accurate clickbox for the corner of the window possibly be?
I've used Linux as my daily OS for 20 years and got so used to alt-right resize and alt-left drag that the macOS and Windows way of actually needing to move my mouse to the corner or edge of a window feel almost barbaric in comparison.
I still have found no way free equivalent on macOS.
Do you have any "inside knowledge" that this was caused by LLM use or do you just attribute everything you don't like to AI?
The UI wasn’t perfect before. It’s slowly been getting worse with each of their dumb updates to make it look more like iOS over the years.
What we’re forced to use now is just a joke. Ignoring all the visual design issues they can’t even make basic stuff fully functional.
I hear it when I read 7 px -> 6 px means 14%(!!!!) less likely to find the horizontal/vertical only drag area.
Fitts's Law is logarithmic, not linear, and at these sizes the dominant factor is whether the target is discoverable at all, not its sub-millimeter width. "14%" smuggles in precision that doesn't exist in the underlying motor reality; it takes an imperceptible physical change and launders it through a ratio with a small denominator to produce a number that feels alarming. You could just as honestly say "we moved the edge by 0.097 mm**" and nobody would blink.
* I think? It feels like there'd be prior art on this
**