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Comment by wangchow | Hacker News Reader

And you can't even snap windows left-and-right like in other OS's. Apple is too caught up on trying to be that anti-establishment-use-different-key-combos-than-the-standard-and-forget-about-standardized-ports sort of workshop. They'd rather do it different than do it practical as it's done in Windows and Linux (well, depending on the Window manager). :)

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Since the Macintosh predates Windows and Linux, it's arguably the Macintosh that set the standard and the others that are anti-establishment. :-)

Seriously, Apple is very unlikely to change the keyboard defaults to match Windows, since (among other reasons) it would unnecessarily aggravate long-time Mac users.

Edit: Long-pressing the green zoom button in El Capitan lets you move the window left or right to a half-full-screen view -- not exactly what you probably have in mind, but a reasonable approximation.

> since (among other reasons) it would unnecessarily aggravate long-time Mac users.

As if that has ever stopped them (see: Final Cut "Pro" X)

I assume that that doesn't take up a half-hour animation like going full-screen does?

I'm on 10.10 Yosemite, and have no desire to upgrade, since I'm sure that the annoying full-screen functionality is now slightly different and I'll have to spend a few minutes trying to figure out how to un-fuck it again.

> use-different-key-combos-than-the-standard

As someone who lives in the command line, the fact that they use the standard readline/emacs key combos is one of the few things I really appreciate about OSX.

For sure. And you can actually copy/paste normally in the command line without the use of the shift key.

Apple is different from the standard because the standard sucks. With macOS you get: CLI bindings on control, GUI bindings with command, and text entry with option and shift. The Windows equivalent is just a mess, even with an extra Windows™ key that ends up being mostly useless. And don't get me started on Ubuntu.

It's not just Emacs bindings, you can customize system-wide text area navigation (including any well-behaved apps)[1]. It's one of many things I appreciate about OSX.

[1]: http://xahlee.info/kbd/osx_keybinding.html

I think these boil down to personal preferences. My home/preferred OS is Mac, my work OS is Windows, and I find myself just preferring how macOS handles things just because it is more hands off in my opinion.

I disabled window snapping because I don't like the OS meddling with where I put windows - I dislike having hot-corners that activate when I don't intend them to, and it's frustrating to have things resize on me when I'm arranging windows for my viewing needs.

I also dislike having so much functionality on CTRL in windows since I find I get a lot of annoying unexpected behavior due to my own laziness. On OS X, typing short cuts are tied to CMD, but a few crucial editing shortcuts are tied to option, such as deleting the entire preceding word. On Windows, this is on CTRL and sometimes I screw up and don't release ctrl fast enough so it catches my next keystroke with CTRL and tries to perform a command. I grant this is my problem since I'm either too slow or fast and my hands are trained for an OS X keyboard, but it just makes more sense to my mind.

I don't think this is so much "anti-establishment" as much as just a different way of doing things, and I like the idea of keeping the commands separated a little. It's the same with alt-tabbing/cmd-tabbing - I understand the way Windows does it, but I like the way OS X does it better. CMD+Tab for apps, CMD+~ for windows within an app instead of all windows on the same...um...chain I guess.

It's not that I can't use Windows (quite the opposite), I just dislike it's attempts at convenience. I'm glad it's a setting, so I have no ill-will really, but I think it's just preference.

I've been pretty happy with this app for snapping windows: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/magnet/id441258766?mt=12

I like Spectacle, which looks like it has similar functionality to Magnet but is free and open source on GitHub:

https://www.spectacleapp.com/

https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle

> And you can't even snap windows left-and-right like in other OS's.

For apps that support split-view, you can do that in one of the following ways:

• The easiest is to just press and hold on a window's Green/Fullscreen button.

• Activate Mission Control, then drag a normal window to the desktop space of an existing fullscreen window.

• Activate Mission Control, then drag a window into a blank space at the top to make it fullscreen, then drag another window to that newly created desktop space to make them share it in split-view.

Mission Control can be activated by:

• Hard-dragging a window by its titlebar to outside the top of the screen to activate Mission Control.

* Pressing F3.

* Throwing the mouse cursor to a preset Hot Corner.

I install ShiftIt and use the keyboard to do that, just like Windows+left/right/up/down in Windows 7+.

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