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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, some (arguably most) of the missing features/core problems are due to the fact that OSX has been all-but-ignored by Apple for half a decade, but some of them are just due to the fact that the UNIX paradigms are becoming outdated. Google is trying to solve the latter problem with Fuschia, you're right, which is interesting. But so far that OS's UX also looks like it's primarily mobile-focused, even if it's designed to be adaptable to desktops too.

I think OSX's UX problems are mainly in the first category - Apple just doesn't care. Windows introduced snapping in Windows 7, nearly ten years ago. It is extremely useful and seems pretty easy to implement. As you say, you can always get a third-party application like the (fantastic) BetterTouchTool. But you shouldn't have to do that for something so fundamental. The very least Apple could be bothered to do is keep up.

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I actually like having to use third party utilities for things like snapping, because it means I can pick the snapping paradigm I want, rather than the one Apple chooses for me.

Gnome has built-in functionality, yet it can still be extended with third-party plugins. One doesn't preclude the other.

It depends on how the built-in functionality is implemented. If it's a plugin of some sort that I can remove/disable and replace, built-in functionality is ok. OSX doesn't generally pick that route, though.

macOS does have — kind of — window snapping, doesn’t it? The split window mode? Or am I missing something? Although I agree that it should be more flexible and should have better keyboard controls....

It does not, or at least I haven't found it in the past four years of using OSX for all of my professional development.

It has multiple desktop spaces, fullscreen mode, and "expose". It used to be that clicking the green dot on a window expanded it in developer-defined ways that were often unpredictable, but that got replaced with fullscreen mode.

I am talking about the Split View mode described at https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT204948

Huh. Well look at that. It's apparently hard to find, and it does appear that you're limited to splitting a "fullscreen" view - i.e., no menu bar, dock, or other windows - but it's better than nothing.

Yeah — not to mention the lack of keyboard controls like Windows 10. Sigh!

spectacle provides these features. But I agree, it should be part of the OS's UX

Since finding out about Spectacle, I don't even really make use of BTT at all anymore, even though it is still installed and running...

If you option-click the green dot, the window will resize in the “classic” way.

I don't know why you would want window snapping. It doesn't provide any benefit

Scenario: I want to position three separate windows so that I can see and use all of them on a single screen. When I launch the three application windows, they launch stacked on top of one another.

With window snapping, I can use keyboard shortcuts to quickly position each window and have all 3 windows be fully visible in their own distinct space, without having to remove my hands from the keyboard.

If window snapping 'doesn't provide any benefit', then there must be some alternate method that achieves what I've described above. What is this alternate method?

You can realistically only look at one thing at one time. Having 2 windows side by side is useful when referencing one and writing in the other. Otherwise command tab to switch works way better.

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