Resizing windows on macOS Tahoe – the saga continues
noheger.at532 points by erickhill 10 hours ago
532 points by erickhill 10 hours ago
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!
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/qv0vmz/missing_supe...
On Linux if you learn shortcuts for close/minimise/maximise as well, you can even remove window borders and title bars entirely. It's free screen real estate.
The gnome window title bars are obnoxiously thick and useless by default tho. I've found that Unity or even just Windows like styling in Gnome is a lot more respectful to your screen real estate.
That is a tradeoff that makes it nice when you have a convertible laptop.
I wish it was simply configurable from the settings dialogs.
On macOS, you can enable window dragging by holding down the Control+Command keys with this command:
defaults write -g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture -bool true
MacOS is the "it just works" operating system. As such, I think the moment that you need to declare custom workarounds like this, it kind of loses its legitimacy, and you should already be in Linux land.
I abhor the current state of macOS and Tim Cook’s leadership, but your take is nonsensical.
For one, “it just works” hasn’t been used in over a decade, same as Google’s “don’t be evil”, which does tell you something about their current philosophies.
But more importantly, “it just works” was obviously never about it “it reads your mind and does every software feature however you personally like”, it was about the integration of hardware and software and not having to fiddle with drivers and settings to get hardware basics working.
Compared to my old NixOS with tiling window manager, I’d say MacOS panes just doesn’t work. I have Rectangle, but it’s no comparison to the full tiling experience. I switched for Apple Silicon nothing more
But, believe it or not, is very customizable (and previously very scriptable). I have Shift+Command+M (maximize) bound to resize to fit the content (different from full screen in macOS). Anything that’s in a menu can be bound to a keyboard shortcut without any additional utilities.
I have multiple virtual desktops. Can I move a window to the next desktop from the keyboard without 3rd party software yet?
Yes, the mac user faces incredible disillusion when he discovers that "just works" was just another marketing gimmick (to the likes of it doesn't get viruses!)
I found myself closing Linux windows sometimes only with alt+F4; sometimes only with ctrl+Q; sometimes with both; sometimes with none
Windows is also the "it just works" operating system, and it has hundreds of useful things you can only do through registry hacks.
It's not a very useful test.
I look at the good things about macOS over desktop linux like how cmd-c/v works across all apps, and it would be amazing if it were just a cli command to bridge the gap.
In my experience, Windows is very far from a "it just works" OS.
It's the ambition as a home user OS though, like macOS. And in the discussion of "it just works" operating systems, who else are we to go by than the vendor ambitions? Personal opinions? In that case, neither is because both struggle to always work in all scenarios since their respective inceptions.
AFAIK Windows has never been known or marketed as "it just works". It goes long way to maintain backwards compatibility, but lets not kid ourselves that it has any semblance to what Apple's "it just works" is supposed to mean.
In what universe has Windows ever been a "it just works" OS? Not this one.
I don't think I know how to confirm that command is correct, and I've been a Mac user for decades. If Apple's solution to problems is "trust the CLI command you found on a website" then I might need to sell some shares.
Wish it worked on all windows. For some reason Settings is exempt from this, for example.
It (partially) works, but only if the cursor is NOT hovering over the right portion of the window. So only 30% works.
if you search
NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture
you see how often this feature gets broken and type some other flag or install 3rd party app.
I used to use the Sawfish window manager ... before it fell out of maintenance, oh and before I switched to DEs with the window manager bolted on.
The thing I miss the most from Sawfish is that it let me resize any window. There are a lot of fixed-sized modal dialogs with scrollbars that wouldn't need them if they were taller, and there's a lot of room on my portrait monitor!
What a nice feature! Really puts the user in control. Is there any maintained WM allowing this? How are modals treated on tiling WMs?
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.
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.
It's not like Apple would frown about the idea of an action having "no intuitive visual associated with it". On iOS, you can scroll to the top by pressing on the status bar as one example.
Unless your status bar is on the bottom. Then scrolling up is really hit or miss
Oh, I get having a visual way of doing it with just a mouse for sure. But for power users or even just-a-little-bit-of-knowledge users it's super quick and convenient. When I had to use Windows for work it drove me nuts that the option wasn't there (ended up finding AltDrag thankfully).
On Windows, I use AltDrag.
Altdrag doesn't work with scaling and is missing some other nice to haves, The Altsnap fork of it fixes this. Its one of the first things i install.
windows does support [win] + [arrow key] though
Mac supports the win (Cmd) + arrow key thing too; figured I'd mention since the story is about macOS window management.
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).
Same here. I use both!
> 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).
I've tried this with Hamerspoon to no avail and ultimately gave up... if you find a workaround, I'm all ears!
I really miss AHK...
How are you liking Aerospace? I miss i3. I tried a few TWMs in Mac but they felt quite janky, but it's possible I just didn't give them time.
Not OP but it's the best auto tiling WM I've found for MacOS so far. Yabai requires SIP disabled for what I would consider core features which is a no go on a work laptop. Aerospace sides steps this and MacOS's horrible window management by just not using the built in spaces. I've only had to restart it a couple times over the last 4 months due to bugs.
I also use https://github.com/acsandmann/aerospace-swipe to add trackpad support.
For window move I think it's a reaction to the popularization of putting UI in the window titlebar so there's nothing to grab onto. I don't mind it but I wish there was a dedicated "grab" button on the mouse because I find it clunky to have to use both hands to manage windows.
I can tell you the feature of Meta/Super¹+L/R click to move/resize windows has existed on Linux long before UI in the window titlebar became a thing.
¹ aka Windows key
Yeah I use a third-party add on for macOS that does something similar.
The only annoyance is situations where you are moving the mouse while also starting to press a ctrl+ or cmd+ key combination and unexpectedly move or resize the window in the process.
i use this. it’s not maintained so you need to manually enable its access to assistive control in Settings but besides that still works great:
https://github.com/jmgao/metamove
it does exactly what you want coming from Fluxbox-style window managers
here’s how i configure it (it has a settings ui, this just automates setting it up) https://github.com/justjake/Dotfiles/blob/3d359f961b009478ef...
i didn’t notice the hideous corner grab areas for a few weeks after updating to 26 because i never tried to use the corner
It turns out the reason they reverted is likely regressions as noted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46999858
>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).
Pedantic, you don't know the distribution, so the chance could be higher
The reduction was specifically to the in-window side of the edge, so it's definitely greater than 14%.
Yeah, and not to mention the increase in likelihood click events the user intends for the application will make it through successfully, rather than being stolen by the window manager.
I had similar thought but didn't want to be that guy.
My take is sometimes we get paid to be that guy and precision has its place and value.
We get lost when being right is seen as having value - instead of improving clarity and precision if needed in a specific context.
Screens are getting bigger and bigger, yet they make things smaller and harder to click on.
Back in the days when it was common for Macintosh to have 640x480 screens (or even smaller), they still fully visible window controls that were impossible to miss.
https://erichelgeson.github.io/blog/2021/03/23/ultimate-syst...
>Screens are getting bigger and bigger, yet they make things smaller and harder to click on.
And despite things being smaller, there's also white space everywhere so there is less information on your screen.
The trend in UIs is making filenames into discrete icons instead of lists. In outlook this morning all I got 3 attachments and it's 3 icons that all are something almost identical like "<word icon>2026-02-13_A....docx" and I have to hover over them to figure out each filename. I don't get it.
I'm a Solidworks user. It's a 3D CAD program. From about 2012 to 2018, it was unusable with a display higher than 1080p because it did its own bad scaling of UI. Text elements would overlap and be cut off. Since then it works in general but to make 2D drawings I still change to 1080p. Making drawings involves a lot of clicking on lines and vertexes to add dimensions, but the hitboxes are 1 dimension thick, or even 1 single pixel. It's maddening at 4K. There are selection filters that help, but since it's sluggish in general in 4K I just admit defeat and use 1080p.
I’ve been a mac user since 1994, system 7, and it feels to me like the overall Mac user experience and reliability (stability, speed, etc) really peaked with Snow Leopard, 10.6.
This probably has a lot to do with the vastly improved hardware design around then - the touchpad specifically on the “blackbook” Core 2 Duo era macbooks was a step change, and they keyboard was pretty great too. Multi-monitor support was fantastic compared to everything else too.
You have to wonder what the design principles of pre-X MacOS paired with modern Apple hardware could achieve.
I have the feeling the regions are the same since the EGA's 620x200 (and hercules mode!) days of windows 3.x for almost all operating systems. Some window managers have updated it a bit but if you look at the increase in pixel density (640x480 on a 14" crt is 57ish ppi, and that is being very generous, vs my home display of 110ppi and the retina displays with 200+ ppi) I get the idea the regions have stayed the same in pixel size despite display scaling and such.
Or we all go (back) to tiling window managers and get rid of all the resizing with the press of a key, or even no press.
> Screens are getting bigger and bigger, yet they make things smaller and harder to click on.
Totally true. I have some some UX designers daily driving 4k monitors with 2k resolution to see things clearly!!
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?
It broke some NSWindow styles: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/814798
It can be some technical detail.
For example: imagine you have 2 windows, the lower right corner of one window almost touching the upper right corner of the other, so that the bounding rectangles overlap but the graphics don't.
With the inaccurate "false square" corners, you just had to check the bounding rectangles, to know which window to resize, now you have to check the actual graphics (or more likely, a mask).
I am not saying it is the problem, but that's the kind of thing that can happen. Or it may be a simple bug, like a crash, memory corruption, an unhandled exception, the usual stuff, but they couldn't fix it in time and it is better to revert instead of leaving the buggy code or pushing an untested fix.
Just revert the code back to pre-26! This is ridiculous, it can't possibly be this hard and if it is, it just points to the degradation in the quality of Apple software! This is maddening!
This is already the pre-26 bounding box, isn't it? It's the new graphics that don't line up. (Not a great excuse, but the graphics are here to stay at least for a little while.)
> the graphics are here to stay at least for a little while
And that's the reason why I won't buy a new Mac.
Tahoe and Liquid Glass are so horrible that they're going to lose customers because of those. They should realize what they did and just backtrack: it wouldn't be the first time they admit they made a mistake [1].
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/4/21246223/macbook-keyboard-...
> it can't possibly be this hard
Whenever I find myself saying this I remind myself it can in fact be this hard.
Pre-Tahoe windows didn't have these stupid round corners (which is the ACTUAL bug which should be fix).
I am using Sequoia and the windows are definitely rounded! Though the radius is pretty small (the curved region is about a quarter of the mouse cursor area), so the fact you can drag it from outside the window doesn't look ridiculous.
Maybe they reverted it because they are already planning to get rid of the super rounded corners!
Most likely (and natural): they tested it publically and the response wasn't positive, so they held it back until they could do it better.
I think it shows how difficult it is to ship a seemingly easy thing inside the Apple machine.
I'm more interested in how or why this bug was approved up be worked on so quickly after it was surfaced, rather than other longstanding and arguably more impactful bugs.
It's because the bug got publicity. Apple marketing prioritizes what does and doesn't get built. Someone saw bad publicity on the front page of HN and requested a fix.
The answer is probably a ho-hum combination of different teams work on different issues, and this one having annoyed one of the devs who could work on it.
macOS does have weirdness with windows that span multiple screens. I bet some of that kicked in to an unacceptable level. It can create incoherent moving/snapping, for example. Has been kind of crazy-making for a while, for my set-up where screens are not joined but adjacent in a triangular configuration.
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
The AI reverted the change and no one does proper code reviews anymore so it went into prod.
What astounds me the most about this whole thing is that the sort of hit testing involved here is a solved problem in UI, and has been for decades, yet there are still plenty of others here and elsewhere arguing about how it isn't. Even with those horrid rounded corners it's not hard, as shown in the article, which makes me wonder whether there is some internal fight between those who didn't want rounded corners (developers?) and hence tried their hardest to make it buggier, and those who wanted them (designers?), with lots of back-and-forth that eventually gave us this outcome. A disturbing amount of time and $$$ was probably spent on it, as is usual for any bureaucracy.
Yesterday I thought the same thing about web app UI - solved problem, why GCP has to re-invent it and do it worse? Same thinking applies here - is it due to a fight between developers and products?
Mobile Safari has some horrific hit-testing for touches. There's plenty of places where touching near a control incorrectly snaps the tap to the control (sometimes with rather nasty usability consequences).
Ideally there should be some way to control the tapzone within CSS.
Last time I needed to fix the problem on a page I was responsible for it required adding an HTML element, which was far from ideal. I seem to recall I also had to explicitly add an onclick handler too (registering an onclick handler silently modifies touch behaviour on Safari - a nasty hidden side effect). There's some new badness with stealing taps in iOS26's Safari - ugggh.
Since we talk resizing windows, for months I was _sometimes_ unable to resize windows at all, and couldn't figure out why. I thought it was a random bug of macOS.
Finally I realized the issue: if a window spans across two displays, it won't resize. Insane!
(I have an external monitor up, laptop down, and it's easy to move a window such that it stretches a few pixels from monitor to the laptop. No resize for you!)
Window management isn't macOS' strong suit, but external monitors make it act absolutely crazy. Connecting monitors will do anything from keeping all windows in the same position to restoring previous positions to launching them across screens, sometimes completely outside visible screen space, seemingly arbitrarily.
I get why Apple wants you to make every window either a small tile or a full screen application now, their window manager simply can't cope with anything else.
Whatever they're doing is somehow worse than both Windows and the major Linux desktop environments. Maybe there's some obscure preference among old school macOS users that like having their windows placed so that only a small corner pokes out of the bottom left when attaching an external monitor?
On the topic of multi monitor messiness, NOTHING gets my blood boiling quite like the taskbar (or whatever it's called, the bottom application drawer) moving between monitors, seemingly arbitrarily
Keep your cursor hovered over the bottom of the 2nd monitor? It moves. Want to move it back? I have tried everything I could think of to try get it back, I still to this day after 5 years of being on Mac because work forces it on me cannot see the logic or heuristic it chooses for when to move the fucking dock. I swear it's basically random, and it's a daily occurrence for me that I have to just shake my cursor violently to get the stupid thing to eventually move.
The worst part is you can't even disable this dumbass behavior! You can't tell it "Hey, dock should ONLY be on monitor 1", so you just have to live with this anti feature
As far as I can tell, the dock appears on either the left/rightmost display (when docked to the side) or on the main display.
What is the "main display"? You can find out by going to settings > displays, where you find a "use as" dropdown that can be set to "mirror", "main display", or "extended display". If you want to move the dock, change the main display. This also affects a few other, smaller things.
I personally put the dock to the side so it doesn't take up precious space (windows don't seem to want to cover the dock if it's at the bottom, even with the setting for that disabled).
I remember early OS X (10.4 / 10.5? - damn, that was 20 years ago?!) with a laptop and external monitor.
It was farcical, as the menu bar was always only on the primary monitor, so you had to use/click menus on that monitor, even if the actual window the menu was for was on the other monitor.
Around 10.7 or so they started putting menus on both monitors at the same time to at least make this scenario a bit more sane.
You can turn this off in the settings, forgot exactly where. I actually found after 1-2mo I preferred not being able to haha
Easy to stretch a few pixels? Easier to move windows with super+arrows so they snap perfectly to the monitor borders, and then you'd never have this issue. I rarely drag windows "by hand" (by mouse) anymore!
The updates shipped by apple introducing more bugs every cycle. It is across the board, macos, ios and ipad os. The fact there is a group inside apple, that is capable of standing against common sense and users best interest for so long, tells how wrong things are internally.
It is the steve balmer - satya nadella moment of apple.
1. Plugging my laptop to the same desktop screens requires rearranging displays almost every time. 2. Airdrop stops working for no apparent reason. 3. Copy paste across devices no longer a stable mechanism. 4. The stupid new preview app crashing if you scroll pdf pages too fast. And on and on. Those are all newly introduced critical bugs i have been facing since that flameboyant liquid glass virus took over.
Apple is a sillicon valley pioneer from the generation of hewlett packard (before it was called HP) bell labs and others. Watching a decay at its beginning is mind boggling and tragic.
For the first one (and all other screen-related bugs) you can use BetterDisplay to fix it: https://betterdisplay.pro/
Also MacOS completely crashes if you have ethernet cable connected and decide to also turn on the WiFi. No "hey, choose whatever you wish" or "hey, disconnect from ethernet first" errors, just complete crash to reboot, lol.
I abandoned MacOS back in 2018 since I found it too quirky and poweruser-unfriendly (the main thing that comes to mind is neatly indicated by todays other MacOS related frontpage article on resizing). Now we can add overt instability to the list.
> In total the thickness went down from 7 to 6 pixels, which is a 14% decrease, making it 14% more likely to miss it.
But also a 14% higher chance that you won't hit it by accident.
This is not a situation where bigger is simply better. If the thickness was 50 pixels, that would make it pretty much impossible to not resize the windows. I am one of those who believe that there are still people at Apple who care deeply about user interfaces. Given the amount of attention paid to the regions for resizing by dragging the corner, I actually assume that they also took a second look a dragging the edges, and concluded that 6 pixels was better than 7.
It's bad when stock Gnome is better. That's where I am now.
Switched to KDE Plasma last month and very pleased I can have square-corner windows again.
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...
Gnome had a scroll speed setting but it broke and disappeared somewhere around the switch to Wayland without getting replaced.
Gnome says libinput should deal with scroll speed. Libinput says GTK+ should deal with it. Patches have been lying around for both but neither has gained any traction.
I like Gnome's DE in general but this issue showcases the rough edges of open source collaboration the Gnome project is infamous for.
Even KWin's (original?) implementation of the feature wasn't great and caused issues with applications, apparently: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/4672#not... Broken as though it might be, at least they're trying something, which I appreciate more as an end user than the complete lack of scroll settings.
KDE plasma is the best DE that exists right now (once you configure it to mimic gnome 2).
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
Spotlight and Mission Control (and the dock) being separate is good, and them being tied together on Gnome is horrible.
I just want to type which app to launch or do some quick math or search for something, I don't need my windows and UI to fly in 14 different directions and then back again every time I need to do those things. Ditto for just want to lazily do something on my dock with the mouse. It's seriously one of the most ill designed off-putting UX things about Gnome.
Agreed. Even Windows has some nice stuff when it comes to windows management IMHO. Every time I end up on macOS I miss the various Windows/GNOME behaviours e.g. window snapping to the right/left half, pressing the Win key to see all open apps, maximise buttons that doesn't put the whole app into full screen mode, etc.
I agree that macOS has become worse, however your examples don't really count:
Window snapping was implemented some time ago: https://www.macrumors.com/2024/06/12/macos-sequoia-window-ti...
Instead of win key, you can press F3, or just set a hotkey that works for you in the System Preferences
Instead of clicking the red maximize button, you can double-click the window header / title. This will use an algorithm to try to resize the window to the best size for its content.
Option-click green button does window maximise (normal click does full-screen)
You can also hold ALT and press the green button to mazimze.
The app still gets to decide though! Most programs do go full size with an alt+green click, but not all. A column-style Finder window, for example, seems to go taller but no wider.
macOS gained window snapping last year, and you can bind some keyboard shortcut to the “exposé” view (which is triggered by a trackpad gesture by default)
full screen is still its own thing as you mention, though
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!
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.
* https://www.hammerspoon.org/
* https://gist.github.com/joedrago/bfc54f4083b070fe998d519cc6c...
Swish⁽¹⁾ lets you drag the divider to resize multiple windows at once. BentoBox⁽²⁾ is inspired by Fancy Zones. And Lasso⁽³⁾ is a grid-based window manager with custom layouts. There's also MacsyZones⁽⁴⁾ that appears to resize multiple adjoining windows but I've never used it (it appears to be open-source with an option to pay to support the author).
> FancyZones
I use BentoBox on my MacBook and it is just as good as FancyZones on Windows. I think I paid 9 dollars, and I have it for life.
I like powertoys but it’s taking 1.17Gig of space. That should be illegal
It's amazing how much effort is wasted adding various OS degradation features (like poorly readable redesign) while bread & butter basics are broken for decades (it's a bad primitive to require pixel-perfect precision for resizing) and even get worse following those design gimmicks like rounded corners
(and, of course, custom radii would've helped, but users can't have such powers, Apple knows best)
So I was thinking 26.3 will be me "my" version of Tahoe. But I'll just leave Tahoe out completly.
Absolutely. Hoping 27 winds all of this back but maybe we’re waiting until 28, or 29… or maybe this is just how it is forever now.
So, there's still no option to adjust the corner radius?
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.
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.
Makes my recent decision to ditch osx for Linux with a tiling wm seem all the more fitting
it isnt perfect, but with BetterTouchTool you can toggle resizing -- e.g. three finger double tap on a trackpad, move your cursor around to resize, double tap again to exit the mode.
I use Yabai, which is pretty good -- and you don't have to completely disable SIP.
For moving windows around (floating if using Yabai), I just hold HYPER and move my cursor around (Start Moving Windows). Release HYPER and it stops.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Funny, I never want the screenshot saved to a file and I literally never look at the desktop. I either use ctrl to store the screenshot in the clipboard or want to use marker tools and then copy the clipboard. This new flow was an improvement to me.
I use a trackpad exclusively with MacOS. If I want it immediately on the desktop then I can just "swipe away" (to the right) the thumbnail and it skips the pause.
Not perfect but I do value being able to edit it from there, or right click and save to clipboard. So it works for me.
For me I want it to hang around longer actually. I will take the screenshot I want, open up mail or messages or something to dump it there. Right as my mouse is hovered over it and a milisecond before I can click it, it jumps away. I've resorted to sometimes giving it a partial drag which resets the counter while I am still getting situated over to wherever the screenshot is going.
> needing to know obscure things like Win+E
I'm sorry but this is a skill issue. This is the second hotkey you learn in Windows, after Win for start menu, and before win+left/right to snap windows to sides of the screen.
Regardless, the whole flow both of you are talking about can be done on Windows without ever touching the mouse. Win+E Win+E Win+Left Enter Alt+D "destdir" Enter Alt+Tab Alt+D "sourcedir" Enter (arrow to whatever you want) ctrl-X Alt+Tab ctrl-V.
I use Linux with i3wm at home, I haven't used Windows as my main OS in nearly a decade and I can still play out those keystrokes in my mind without thinking about it.
Now, win+E -> click folder -> alt+D -> "powershell" -> enter? That's power user shenanigans.
I think that the only windows hotkey I know is Windows key to open the start menu. But I've been using Windows only 1994-2008, then Linux. I still connect to some Windows 10 / 11 machines of a customer to check processes and log files, but that doesn't matter.
And I hate windows snapping. I disable it in GNOME at every new OS install. UIs must fit people preferences and any single person is different.
Edit: of course I know Alt Tab too.
> needing to know obscure things like Win+E
I haven't used Windows since the early days of 10 when I moved wholesale to Apple, but let's be really real - Apple users mocking "obscure shortcuts" in other OSes is throwing stones in a glass house:
Cmd+` to scroll through windows of the current app?
Cmd+Option+H to hide other apps?
Cmd+Shift+Ctrl+4 to clipboard copy a screenshot?
Quick, is Mission Control a three finger swipe up? Or down? Or is that Expose?
Cmd+space,Cmd+B to search web from Spotlight
Cmd+tab, release tab, press Q - quit app without switching to it
Cmd+tab, then down - Expose.
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.
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.
Moom looks great! Is there a Mac app which enhances the functionality of desktops/workspaces?
The mac desktop works on a totally different paradigm than the Windows-like model most other desktops have adopted. It’s built around not managing windows and instead letting them be whatever size fits their content and pile up like papers on a desk, complete with having relevant bits of some windows peek out from underneath other windows.
For those it works for, it works really well. For those who came from windows always being maximized or split into a grid, it’s a nightmare.
Pretty similar to differences in real world desk styles, actually.
That used to be the case, but in 10.7 they changed the green window button from being "zoom" (snap the window to fit its content) to "fullscreen". They let you change the default behavior back to zoom for a few years but seem to have gotten rid of that setting. You can still access the zoom behavior by option-clicking the green button, but on basically every program I've tried, zoom just means "maximize" like on Windows now. The only exception I've found is Preview, where "zoom" seems to mean "make the window take up most of (but not all of) the screen and scale the image up to some random value". One image I tried got scaled to 146%, another got scaled to 207%. I would think it should mean "scale the image to 100% if it's smaller than the display resolution" but who knows, I don't work at Apple.
Edit: Finder still has the correct zoom behavior, it's the only program I've found so far that does.
The behavior of the (now option-clicked) zoom button is actually determined by each individual program. Most stock apps will either fit to content or toggle between the last two recent sizes, but a lot of third party apps (especially those built with foreign UI frameworks) tend to turn it into a maximize button.
This has been built in since Sequoia. It’s literally dragging the window like aero snap.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-window-tilin...
I've been using Rectangle (https://rectangleapp.com/) for years now. IMO the shortcuts actually make it a massive improvement over Windows.
Lots of 3rd party tools to help, like Rectangle or Raycast. And at least the most recent macOS release has auto-snap and tiling features: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/mac-help/mchlef287e5d/...
There is also this option you can enable to drag windows around when holding a shortcut: https://petar.dev/notes/drag-windows-on-macos/
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)
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.
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...
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.
I don't think this is a meaningful distinction. Most people here likely change more than just a 'few settings' and either download one of the debloat tools or generate an autounattend.xml before installing, and some replace the default search with Everything.
Unless you're working in an environment where absolutely no third party tools are allowed, it's expected for someone to spend at least a little bit of time adjusting the workspace to their preferences.
Additionally all of the tools I listed technically have paid plans but they're all free to use, I've never paid for Raycast yet even the free features blow out of the water any desktop management/productivity tooling I've used on Windows or Linux.
A few settings, huh?
https://gist.github.com/NateWeiler/f01aa5c6e8209263bc2daa328...
We are in this discussion sometimes talking about things that are "missing" from Mac that are actually outdated omissions, no longer accurate. For example, Snap Layouts is now a built-in feature in macOS, but some folks are talking like it's impossible to snap windows in macoS. It's just not as robust/customizable as third-party tools and I think most people who started using the third-party tools should stick to them.
We can go the other way around if we cherry-pick in the other direction:
PowerToys Peek is a separate install, but Finder has this built-in as the Spacebar shortcut (Quick Look)
Preview App: This has been the best free PDF app on the market for decades now and Windows still doesn't have something that compares well in 2026
Spotlight: Still clearly superior to the Windows Search/keyboard-based app launching experience
AirDrop: I know, I can't include this because it's a hardware ecosystem feature, but I'm including it anyway because KDE has a better solution than Windows, and I find that totally insane. I use it on Windows, too!
Migration Assistant: I realize that Windows PCs have a lot of OEM variation, but I think Microsoft could implement a similar experience if they tried.
Backups: I don't really give Apple many points for Time Machine because (1) I don't think many people use it, and (2) I don't think it's really the greatest on its own, but it sure beats what Windows has going on with Windows Backup.
Save as PDF: This isn't a problem anymore, but for many years/decades, Apple's built-in support for turning anything that can be printed into a PDF beat out Windows by a longshot, and I remember how I used to need to install third-party tools to accomplish it.
Full device encryption: I just think the user experience of Bitlocker is piss poor, while Apple makes this a very smooth experience with a very low chance of screwing up and losing data (so long as you tie your system to your Apple ID to add that as a recovery option). The end result is that most Windows users are running unencrypted, while I imagine most Mac users are encrypted.
POSIX utilities: Now, it's not like Apple includes the greatest set of POSIX utilities, and you have to install xCode command line utilities to get many of them, but still, I am not really sure why Microsoft doesn't just port and install many of these utilities natively rather than having you either learn PowerShell, install Git for Windows, or install WSL. I think it is very clear by this point that most people who want to spend time in a terminal in the first place want to be in POSIX-land. They've got cmd.exe, PowerShell.exe, might as well add a third terminal.
Perhaps we can even make the argument that 100% of Windows users are going to install a third party text editor as using plain notepad.exe is pretty much insane, while a reasonable amount of Mac users will be 100% happy with vim.
Going beyond basic utilities, it's also worth pointing out that Apple has traditionally provided a lot more free software than Windows. iLife and iWork come to mind. Microsoft has somewhat half-heartedly followed suit with apps like ClipChamp. I don't think Microsoft ever shipped anything that came close to the quality of free app you got with GarageBand and iMovie.
I also think Microsoft has a lot more platform abandonment that affects Windows device and OS users. If you bought an original iPod and iTunes music, Apple never pulled the rug from under you. Microsoft couldn't decide between PlaysForSure and Zune, and killed both. Same deal with things like TV show and movie purchases. Windows Media Player died, iTunes (Apple Music, not to be confused with Apple Music the service) is still here, still working with original hardware, and still getting updates.
Apple just killed iTunes Movies' wishlist and they were nice enough about it to email me the full wishlist so that I could "favorite" them (which isn't 100% analogous but they were nice enough to not leave me high and dry).
I think at this point, though, I'm veering a little far off-topic.
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.
I feel like anyone reading that, and thinking that is a reasonable/intuitive design, may be quite far down the rabbit-hole.
It reads like a parody.
It’s significantly worse than I even imagined.
It's two gestures, a swipe and a click and drag.
I'm not even saying Mac is superior here, just that there's a quick way to do full screen splits
The answer, unfortunately, is to install a 3rd party program. Once you do that, it works well enough
you're not wrong, but for convenience's sake you should probably know that you can hold option and click the green "expand" button to fill the workspace
Lmfao yeah so much worse than the OS you have to run massive Powershell scripts from the internet to turn off all the telemetry, OneDrive, and other various degrees of bullshit.
Install Rectangle or anything macOS Sequoia or newer and move on.
Sorry to be that guy who buzzes in - I might be missing something, but don't you just mouse over the green button?
Rectangle Pro.
I'm actually agreeing with you. You shouldn't have to resort to third party apps.
I don’t think the problem is resolvable to everyone’s satisfaction, which speaks to the poor decision to make the windows that shape in the first place.
I’m not sure who (outside of Apple, and perhaps even inside seeing as Alan Dye quit) is satisfied with the extreme round corners we have now. No one asked for that, and it doesn’t provide a single benefit.
It's easily resolvable - you just need to allow custom forms, then every user can pick one of the 3 most popular forms or tweak them to his unique preferences. Of course, this should also be true for window shape so you can remove the rounded corners
No, it cannot. But it does not have to be a moment of horror when you realize you might have to resize a window.
You think this is bad? Try using Apple Music with a traditional mouse. You can’t even right click on half of the interface, dragging elements near to scrollable edges doesn’t trigger any scroll, and UI elements like the star on favourited songs just don’t show up. It’s marginally better on a trackpad.
Tried that now. I have a USB mouse. Can't say I noticed any issues? Scrolling works fine, star works fine... resizing is fine.
Using Music.app on 26.0.1
Resizing windows is easier when you don't have to grab the corner. Some people are talking about holding a key to resize on Linux but I don't want to be forced to use the keyboard.
My favourite solution on macOS is an app called Swish which lets you do trackpad/Magic Mouse gestures to throw windows into corners, along edges, etc.
Why is keyboard a problem if your left hand is always on it? It's easier to do than a mouse only gesture and easier to remember
Using a trackpad gesture is just as quick, easier, more spatially natural, and only uses one hand.
My left hand is not always on my keyboard. I'm not always typing. I'm not modelling 100% of my computer usage after "how to get RSI the fastest"; sometimes, I allow myself to lean back in my chair and just scroll the web, documents, photos etc. from time to time.
> Using a trackpad gesture is just as quick
Definitely not, many of swish gestures require you to move the mouse cursor to the title bar, which takes time, also holding a key and performing a simpler gesture can’t be slower than performing a more complicated gesture (which it needs to be to deconflict with regular mouse use)
Also many gestures have a delay built in so you can cancel or double down for a different functionally (close windows vs close app), so it’s slower by design.
> easier
It’s harder because you have to memorize more gestures and perform more complicated ones.
> more spatially natural
That makes no sense, the spatial movements are the same, can you give an example for resizing?
> and only uses one hand.
Yes, that’s the only potential benefit, unless, of course, your other hand is always near a corner, so it doesn’t matter
> I'm not always typing
That's fine, you don't need to type to have your left hand rest near the left near corner of the keyboard (it doesn’t even have to rest on the home row since you only need the corner)
> I'm not modelling 100% of my computer usage after "how to get RSI the fastest"
Well, you're, you've just moved your RSI to your right hand
Also hands have same length, so leaning back doesn't prevent leaving one finger on a modifier
Anyway, place your hands wherever you like them, it’s just that none of your arguments support it.
What drives me nuts is if I slam my cursor against the right side of the window with the intent to click and drag the scroll bar of a maximized window up and down then the 1px wide window border gets selected and the whole window moves up and down. This has been a bug for several years.
When I select there, if I pull away from the window it resizes and won't drag. If I move the pointer up-down on the right or left side, it moves the window and won't resize.
Which seems like a sensible and convenient choice to me.
Maybe it isn't working so predictably for you?
It's definitely neither sensible nor convenient. I expect it to trigger the scrollbar, not move the whole window. The only way one should be able to move the window is to drag the title bar. There's no reason clicking and dragging the 1px window border should ever move the whole window. Every Linux window manager, Windows, and IIRC Mac System <= 9 behaves this way.
Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave.
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.
> because applications and windows are a separate concept
Is this the reason why "closed" applications still show up in cmd+tab?
Attach a generator to him and the AI datacenter energy needs are solved. Even better, the more trash that AI produces the more energy is generated.
> 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?
Edited. I'm not strictly saying this was caused by AI, but more of a general point that AI is really good at producing crap work which would make the generator spin faster.
Doesn't the cursor change into a pair of <-> arrows when you hover over the clickable area?
Only for the currently focused window which is inexplicably weird
A lot of the cursor weirdness on macOS comes from the window server owning the cursor and only passing events to active windows.
It's kind of nice, though, because you can click anywhere on a window to focus it. If you want to interact with a background window without focusing it, hold Cmd and click.
On every app but the System Settings app since it is so busted it takes 5 or 6 clicks before it focuses.
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.
"Fixed in post" meaning fixed in version XX.00.2 now. Fire QA and use community feedback seems standard now.
I miss resizing windows with alt+right click
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.
Even without the rounded corners it was more difficult than it needed to be. The corner resize should take up way more of the sides of the window. If my mouse is 90% of the way to the corner, what are the odds that I want to resize the window only horizontally or vertically?
Tahoe is the most frustrating daily driver I've endured in decades.
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.
Microsoft Windows has a similar issue. I wonder why nobody is talking about that on HN.
Not just similar, it's exactly the same issue caused by exactly the same kind of change, and is probably hard to fix for almost exactly the same behind-the-scenes complexity on Windows.
Half the time my Mac doesn't show the resize cursor when in regions where it works to resize windows. It's annoying. But not quite the same issue as seen here.
Try moving the spotlight search box. I swear you have to use tweezers to find the razor thing edge.
It seems that the Spotlight Search box (from CMD + Space) can be moved by clicking anywhere on it and dragging.
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.
I don't know what all this fuss is around. I'm not a fanboy and I just use my macbook as a tool.. and the resizing works fine. Is it maybe a mouse thing? I use the touchpad
well this certainly goes a long way to explaining why i've been fighting with window resize on tahoe :p
it's stupidly difficult to grab windows by the flat edges, too
9 out of 10 times I dont even get the cursor change and I have to ‘guess’ if im in the right spot!
It is quite possible the proposed improvement was not implemented because it wasn’t good enough. Fingers crossed for the next version.
Why doesnt apple just hire this guy and fix this?
I bet some manager came up with a perfectly reasonable explanation why it couldn’t be done in this release ))
I used it for like 5 minutes the other day after install and immediately noticed something was off; thanks!
I want a macbook for the insane efficiency of the M5 CPU but I hate the mac GUI.
This is the Apple quality that the premium price is so good to pay for, really how hard must one be into Apple cult.
macos went from quirky-functional to performative-dysfunctional in line with society
I used it for 2 minutes the other day after the install and immediately noticed this wth
Rectangle Pro for the win
Rectangle is a must-have, it’s the very first thing I install after getting brew configured on a new Mac.
Can't you just submit a PR?
What the hell is going on at Apple?
Where are the engineers allocated to?
Who's driving the bus? Cause it sure ain't Siri either.
Hardware first, software second
I wish whoever sacked up and gave the macbook pro its ports again would work for the iphone dept. Me want 3.5mm.
I cannot believe we do not have a good arm Linux laptop with a comparable price and battery to a MacBook at this stage.
I am forced to use this abomination of an operating system just because.
Come on Lenovo, make it happen
Or maybe not Lenovo, I'd like my high-spec Linux laptop to come without a rootkit.
> And in fact, the release notes have also been updated: the problem went from a “Resolved Issue” to a “Known Issue”.
So they finally admit that they are unable to solve a ridiculously trivial problem of their own making. This is a farce. Apple has managed to lose the last remnants of respect and good will on my part. And I cannot trust a platform that is so blatantly mismanaged.
Hyprland
What the....
This is such poor execution on Apple's part.
How is it not pathetic that Apple can't fix this and bring it back to normal behavior? Who is fighting for this stupid behavior? It's driving me crazy as well.
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finally
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"14% over estimates it because the user isn't clicking with uniform randomness, their clicks are normally distributed about the center of the line.
Haven't resized a window with a mouse since using aerospace