Windows user here. Honest curiosity: does anyone know why the minimize / maximize works on the Mac the way it does? I mean, what's the rationale to design it like this?
I rarely, if ever, use Minimize on the Mac. Minimize comes from Windows (and other windowing systems) where the window minimizes to an icon or button on the task bar.
"Maximize" also comes from Windows (and other windowing systems.) As others have noted, in newer macos (which I don't use,) I think it oddly makes the window go full screen. Full screen is a recent macos feature -- I once asked about making my Application go full screen and Apple developer support said that going full screen did not follow their Human Interface guidelines. Something seems to have changed at Apple since I asked about that decades ago.
There was no Maximize on the Mac, it is called "Zoom." The idea is that the window has two sizes and you zoom between the two sizes: One size is the size the user has resized the window to (often with much difficulty) and the other size is an ideal compact size ("optimally fit content") without hiding anything and hopefully where scroll bars do not appear -- it is a UI feature that is/was rarely, if ever, done very well by applications other than the Finder.
By the way, Command-Tab to switch tasks was once an add-on from Microsoft for Mac OS. Go Microsoft! (Mac fanboy here :)
The the MacOS scheme of doing this leads a sort of organic, emergent window layout - I always end up with windows staggered to display relevant bits. With Windows (and with most window managers, X), things always end up either strict tiled or stacked.
I'm very used to the Mac way and prefer it, but that could just be the result of long use. It doesn't waste space (Windows apps always seem to have lots of dead space to me and makes me work to be able to see parts of other windows) and forces me to switch windows far less. But it is a fiarly subtle thing.
My WM of choice is now Xfwm, which allows to rearrange windows easily without gaps, make windows fill available space (vertical and horizontal separately), or tile them by dragging to corners.
On OSX, things like Spectacle and Magnet sort of help.
For me, the goal is not to maximize available space to the frontmost windows; it is to maximize the use of the monitor to display what's currently relevant. It allows me to do things like keep a Finder window open with just a bit peeking through to drag things to, keep an eye on a few lines of a terminal tail -f, see the mailbox pane and room pane in Mail/Slack so I can see if anything new happened I should respond to, etc. all while working on whatever I'm working on.
With the Windows-ish "maximize the window", that is replaced, almost invariably, by useless window background.
Again, I expect this is mostly what one is accustomed to, and the Macish approach is more idiosyncratic to the user. Works for me.
Also, you can maximize a window for a moment, look at it, and then unmaximize it back to its previous size.
I use xfwm4, and turn all of the window snapping off -- unlike Mac and Windows we can customize. ;)
You will pry the Command-key from my cold dead hands:
/usr/bin/setxkbmap -option ctrl:swap_lalt_lctl
Tiling window manager: https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst
Programmable window manager: https://github.com/kasper/phoenix
Also, if you hit the up arrow in the command-tab switcher, you can use the arrow keys to select a minimized window and hit enter to restore it.
Either that or I've gotten very much better at doing this.
I absolutely agree with your guess as to why this is.
in Maximized state the window is set to maximal available size (so you are not wasting any part of the screen) while you are still provided with fast and easy access to relevant OS UI elements
in full screen you explicitly tell the system that you don't want to be distracted by OS UI elemtents (typically in situation when you know that you won't need them for extended period of time, or if you REALLY need every single pixel of the screen)
I'm came from ~18 of Windows & Linux usage and everyone always told me macOS is THE OS with the best usability.
But I can't confirm this.
Minimization of windows is shitty and maximization even more.
When I maximize, often just the height is changed, when I go back to "normal" the height and the width is changed, so I always have to adjust the width manually.
When I minimize a few windows, it's impossible to get back the right one without luck.
I mean it's perfectly usable once I got the basic gestures down and installed the app that let me independently set the track pad and mouse wheel scroll directions, but will go so far as to say that both xfce and MATE are objectively better at window management.
Partly I think their hands were tied by the too late to change decision for the always there contextual top menu bar. Or this is just 25 years of using win95 clones talking and I'm set in my ways.
You wouldnt judge i3 or other completely different approaches after only a few minutes.
absolutely :)
What i like the most is you are just a super key tab away from basically everything so focus on a single thing feels natural and right. There is no way to lose anything either, its all there. Always.
The last time I tried it, I got frustrated when working with a lot of pdf sources - hitting the super key just presented me with a myriad of white rectangles where open windows would frequently rearrange requiring a slow manual search to find the file I was looking for. This can be less of a problem with a taskbar, as the filename is the main identifier, and being 1 dimensional it is easier to scan and preserves its position better.
And there is no proper UI element for checking if you have anything open in a different workspace without opening the switcher.
Some days I still really miss dwm, but having Photoshop, Ableton, and several other things Just Work™ makes it worth it.
Perhaps it's a setting or was the behavior in an older version of macOS?
System Preferences > Mission Control > Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use
Motherfucking maddening as hell.
and if you have many windows open (in win 10 at least) you don't have to press alt+tab 10 times in a row to choose your desired program, you can hold alt+tab and use arrows.
Another frustration is trying to view two apps together on the screen at the same time, if one of the apps itself contains multiple windows. I'm not at my desk to try this but let's say you have multiple chrome windows open, all with their own tabs, and you want to view your current chrome window overlayed on a window from another app. To do this you have to manually minimise all of your chrome windows one by one so they will all move of the way, to allow you to switch between apps and view them both at the same time.
Somehow it is able to open up the device manager and THEN give the window in the background focus when I switch to my editor and back to Xcode with cmd+tab.
So I have to move the Xcode window down, to grab that backgrund thing what seems to be part of Xcode.
Four fingers up, expose. Drag the windows you need up top into a new desktop. Command (or control? Or option? Or a combination?) Plus the right arrow to switch desktops. Try all the combinations until I get to the right desktop or throw the damn thing out a window.
There was no task bar or dock or anything else really to minimise to. IIRC there were addons for 7.1 that added "window shading": a button on the window title bar that reduces the window to just the title bar.[1]
The closest thing to a maximise button in classic Mac OS was more like a size-to-fit button: the application gave the window manager a hint which was the appropriate size for the document displayed, be it a file folder, a word processor document or whatever. Having a single window fill the entire screen wasn't as common as it was on Windows.
None of this was particularly strange to me back then.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowShade apparently a standard feature later on
Yup! For the longest time I liked to work with a half-width browser window to match my half-width editor & word processor windows. It drove me crazy the number of websites which set their body text to some fraction of the window width, which looked good with a fullscreen window but terrible with a halfscreen one.
Eventually I just gave up. The whole point of the web was device-independent information transfer, but somehow we allowed device-dependence to sneak it.
You can play around with it on archive.org. https://archive.org/details/mac_MacOS_7.0.1_compilation
System 7 was WAY earlier than Windows 95, it was 1991, a little more than 4 years earler (like an eternity):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7
"It was introduced on May 13, 1991 ..."
And even 7.1 was almost exactly 3 years earlier: System 7.1
"In August 1992, the 7.1 update was released."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95
"It was released on August 24, 1995"
Not even Windows 3.1 had been released at the time System 7 came out, it's competitor on MS side was DOS (version 5.00):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_DOS_operating_syst...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1x
or some of the various semi-graphical third party shells for DOS.
Sure it did, namely Windows 1.0, 2.10/2.11 (actually Windows/286 and Windows/386), but very few people used them.
Windows 3.0 was the first one to have some diffusion, but it had very limited capabilities, and it's adoption was slow because of the increased specifications for the PC, and in any case not comparable with the later wide adoption of 3.1.
IMO there's a whole generation of people who did their early computing on MS Windows (including myself) and so internalised that that is how GUIs are "supposed to work". When moving to something else later in life there's a feeling that it is "wrong", but it (e.g macOS)'s way of doing things is also correct and is just a divergent evolution to MS Windows. Research, open-mindedness and experimentation are necessary when using something different.
http://osxdaily.com/2010/06/22/make-hidden-application-icons...
It wasn't designed to 'make this window fit the screen'. It was designed to 'make this window fit this A4 document.
Maximize on Mac was NOT designed for the window to fill the whole screen, but rather to resize the window to optimally display its contents. E.g. maximizing a Preview window with a PDF document changes the width of the window to the PDF page width. (Good tip for getting along with your Mac: stop trying to maximize everything.)
In a recent macOS version, Apple changed the green "maximize" button to full-screen, which is very different from maximize. Now double-clicking on most window chromes will execute the old maximize behavior.
The problem with this approach is I definitely do not need someone else making the decision of what is "optimal" for me. I've been using macOS for about as long as I used to use Windows now, and at this point, macOS seems to have largely abandoned the concept, which is great. Applications get either a full screen in their own isolated context, or option-click for a full-screen in a regular windowed context. The options now are a very windows-95/98 like: "either go completely full screen, or resize to whatever you like," which gives me full control of what I find optimal for any given application.
And that's the crux. The whole feature (in its original incarnation) rested on the false assumption that there's a singular "optimal" state at any given time.
The Apple Human Interface Guidelines have been a state-of-the-art reference for good UI for a long time, but the part about the zoom button always baffled me, as it directly contradicted several Core Principles laid out in Part I of the book.
The reason this is done is of course that most applications don't have content that fill the entire screen, so maximizing, in most cases, is meaningless - and hinders the usability of the system.
It makes more sense to leave some space over for other apps than have a big empty area on both sides of the screen.
Interestingly, I noticed that it's only Windows-switchers who complain about this. People who've used Mac for a long time don't give this any thought.
It's a matter of where you place responsibility. It's like saying, "most websites aren't responsive, so naturally it makes sense to restrict the size of your browser window and leave space for other apps." But most would laugh at this and say it's the responsibility of the website/webapp to build a responsive layout. Why should we hold desktop applications to a different standard?
I completely that it is probably almost entirely windows-switchers who complain about it. I'd, obviously, self-aggrandizingly suggest it's because we've tasted something better. People don't complain about the taste of food they've never tasted ;)
I think that's a misrepresentation. It's not a static size. It's not an artificial limit. If the document that's open has content to fill the entire screen, the window will fill the entire screen.
Macs used drag and drop for file management between windows representing separate locations on disk. Windows users tended to select files and choose cut or copy then navigate to the second location and paste.
The same held true for moving content between documents in an application or moving content between applications. Mac users preferred to use drag and drop, while Windows users relied on copy and paste.
The problem with keeping every window maximized is that you're giving up system wide drag and drop as the primary user interaction method.
Personally, I find drag-and-drop handy sometimes but it's very constraining. You have to go through non-standard motions to complete any more that is more than trivial, always holding down the primary mouse button and thereby losing your primary way of interacting with the interface. In other words, sure, if you have a clear view of your destination, then yeah, drag and drop is fine, but in all other instances, it becomes clunky.
Cut/paste is incredibly quick and doesn't sacrifice usability of your interface or input methods between the two ends of the transaction. Windows seemed to balance this out well, where you could drag and drop most of the time, but you could also ALWAYS cut/paste. I despise that I can't cut/paste in finder. Which is why I use PathFinder instead.
The danger cut/paste DOES pose is it fundamentally unlinks the start of the transaction and the end. In between, you can do literally anything, which may mean losing track of what's in your paste. Still, I'd call this a fair trade-off, specifically because it is non-destructive for files. You won't lose a file to to paste. It just stays put.
Then they are shocked later when they paste those files into some random location and can't figure out where they went.
Dragging and dropping does not have that issue. Users find it much easier to learn.
Open the source window. Open the destination window. Drag.
On Windows Ditto, and on Linux CopyQ (among others, and there has to be something like that for Mac) solve this problem, by giving you a preview of what's in the clipboard as well as the history copies you made.
The macOS interface is based around floating and overlapping windows. If you put a window over the whole screen then it could be as well maximized. This gets a bit hairy on smaller screens but really shines on huge monitors. In general macOS is more optimized around having one big screen rather than a multi-monitor setup.
But seriously, minimising windows is a reflex learnt from Windows. In Windows you often need to minimise one thing to find something else. Especially the desktop. On a Mac you can usually find something more quickly in the dock. In Windows you’re far more likely to have an app maximised by default, and minimising is a natural way to switch tasks. On a Mac, minimising is not a natural way of task switching.
I use ShiftIt, a neat little Open Source tool that help me manage windows sizes and positions (including minimizing and maximizing): https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt
I've recommend it to pretty much any Mac user I've met.
I'm actually willing to bet good money that it's the other way around and it's you who is in the minority.
(Yes, yes. It is a lame joke. But who uses only one Window at a time? What is the point of that? Though I remember when I used OS X you could swipe left (or right) to switch back to all other apps. So I think that was good enough.)
You're talking about the "fullscreen" feature which I always found very weird. For example, ever forget your video was "fullscreen"ed as you try to alt-tab to it only to realize it's a 4-finger swipe to pull it back up. Making the user have to differentiate will always be bizarre to me.
In the olden days, Mac users would tend to have lots of overlapping windows. Dragging anywhere on the window edges would move the window, so it was easy to arrange them as you wanted - almost like shuffling bits of paper on your desktop (strangely enough) and if you wanted to move something out of the way, you could fold it up (window shade). There was no need for maximising or minimising and "zooming" just meant "make this as large as makes sense for this particular document", not "expand to take up all the space on my desktop"
As OSX/macOS has developed, all that document/desktop-style behaviour has been lost.
I think that Apple thought that many regular users would switch to full screen apps on the Mac, combined with Launchpad (it's just like an iPad/iPhone). But virtually all non-tech-savvy Mac users that I know do not use Launchpad, nor fullscreen apps.
I think the problem with Launchpad as with Spotlight search [1] is that they are not very discoverable on the Mac. Having search in an application menu (like recent Windows versions and some Linux desktops) is far more discoverable.
I guess people don't use fullscreen apps because they equate desktops/laptops to the 'WIMP' interface paradigm.
[1] If I received a penny every time I see even experienced Mac users launch applications by clicking on a Dock icon or by navigating to the Applications folder in Finder, rather than using Spotlight, I would be rich.
Eh? They still do, as of MacOS 10.13.