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Comment by peatmoss | Hacker News Reader

A couple years back, I was (increasingly un)happily using Mac OS X on a MBP. I made the switch back to a Free *nix and a tiling window manager.

While it's gotten some eye-rolls from tech friends, the UX of my current system is amazing. I have an almost vanilla Xmonad configuration, combined with dmenu, and passwordstore / dmenu integration. It simply rocks.

I anticipate soon starting a new job with a firm that has more or less standardized around Apple hardware. I find myself kind of dreading going back to a Mac. I may decide to be "that guy" and ask for something like the Thinkpad Carbon X1 in lieu of the standard issue equipment.

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I was given a Macbook, and thought I'd get used to it, but I couldn't. Basic stuff is broken, like maximizing a window. Focus-follows-mouse doesn't work properly, and multiple windows from the same application are broken -- I'm not sure what the "correct" way to switch between multiple Firefox windows is, but it's clunky.

Linux on the Macbook can probably work if you're determined, but I'm (obviously) not a fan of Apple hardware. It was much easier to take a spare Dell desktop -- which has twice the RAM and a better CPU than the Macbook.

Standard way to switch between application windows is command-backquote. (cmd-`) Works great.

It does work great, meaning that it reliably executes the intended functionality correctly. My problem is that the intended functionality is not what I want. I have lots of terminals, Emacs windows, browser windows, etc. open at any given time, and I want my window manager to be agnostic to which is which. When I signal "focus next window", I want that to both jump between windows of an application AND jump to a window of another application, whichever is next in the focus ring. You can't (easily at least) do that on a Mac.

I installed https://bahoom.com/hyperswitch to get this behavior (it even has thumbnails of the window), but ideally you would have that option out of the box indeed.

BetterTouchTool is also a handy way of dealing with the lack of a maximize option. Also provides window snapping, which can be quite useful.

Yes!

I've spent so much time in my ion3 setup (now notion..) that changing things is just silly, and I'm so glad I don't have to. Open source code lets you continually port forward what you care about, because you have access to the source code.

I'm on something like 14 years using it? It's just awesome to me that everyone else is off inventing new ways of managing windows, and I'm here pressing F3 to run a program like I always have.

Any chance you're willing to share your config with me? I'm really tempted to get a carbon.

Xmonad is pretty wonderful, even in vanilla. Excellent piece of software!

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