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Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

I've never seen an expose knock-off that captured the magic. Even Apple managed to bungle it in recent releases. At it's peak, the feature really was perfect: perfectly smooth animation and a perfect-feeling organic layout. It didn't try to do too much and it didn't have an agenda of pushing some other feature down your throat.

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In Ubuntu 18.04 by default, if you hit the 'windows' key, you get a smooth old-style Expose effect that shows all the windows.

The only differences are that if you type into that view, it searches Spotlight-style and off the right side there's an auto-hiding multi-desktop switcher. Both are tastefully descreet and strictly improvements imo.

The organic layout was what made Exposé different and useful. Imagine this scenario: four fully maximized windows, one on top of the other. Exposé would put one window on every quarter of the screen, but their places and sizes would be different, so every window moved in a different way. That helped A LOT with eye-tracking. I remember the Compiz knockoff (of 12 years ago) simply assigning each window a quart er of the screen. Same core principle, slightly different execution, yet much much worse usability.

Exposé was a feature of a time when Mac OSX was at its peak. The OSX usability guidelines were very different to the Windows ones, and it showed (every user coming to Mac had to adapt). Apple decided to throw all this away a few years ago. Exposé was turned into Mission Control, which has more features, but worse usability and aesthetics. And macOS is more intuitive to Windows-trained users, at the expense of consistency and power-user productivity.

I personally feel Expose hit a peak in functionality with 10.5, went downhill with the forced grid and gaudy glowing blue, became useless and slow around Lion or so, and is now finally about back to where it was with Mojave.

In the interim I started using Hyperdock which brings windows 7 style window previews to the Dock and I feel like it scales better to large numbers of windows than anything official from Apple.

Exposé is what made me see that 13-inch laptops are a viable option.

i wouldn’t necessarily call it a knock-off. i could be wrong, but looks like spaces first came to OSX in 2006, which is the same year that compiz launched

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaces_(software)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiz

Exposé predates Spaces by a couple of years. The two wouldn’t really be properly integrated (along with Dashboard which was practically abandonware even by this point) until Mission Control came along.

I think parent refers to the original Exposé, which didn't have multiple desktops but was first released in 2003 or 2004. That already had a few cool window animations.

PixelBook has something like Expose, but it’s no where as smooth. It snaps into place in weird ways and that kills the magic.

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