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Comment by wyclif | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood why macOS has never included the functionality of, say, Divvy or chunkwm. I'd like to easily be able to tile my desktop via a keyboard command. Also, I've never quite understood what macOS people have against snapping the edges of windows to each other or the edge of the screen. Sometimes I want to divide the workspace into 3 or 4 windows and maximise my use of screen real estate. It's trivial to do this on a Linux distro (i3, awesome, dwm, ratpoison, etc.) but you have to do some tweaking on macOS, why?

[EDIT: best explanation of why I've heard: it's because the macOS design philosophy is that Apple knows best what size a window is supposed to be, while Linux and BSD are aligned with user-centric custom settings]

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> Also, I've never quite understood what macOS people have against snapping the edges

My go to example to explain this is the “The many windows of John Siracusa” podcast from ATP a few years ago.

The relevant discussion starts at 1:33:00

https://atp.fm/episodes/96

Siracusa, who grew up as a (classic) Mac user, explains his tiling and overlapping habits to Arment and Liss, who grew up as Microsoft Windows users and later switched, and they gasp in utter horror, shock and awe.

For example Siracusa says he currently has a dozen terminal windows open, and also a couple browser windows, normal for him, in BBEdit he regularly hits 20-40; they ask him if he doesn’t know about tabs and he replies “Oh, I love tabs! Of course every Window has many tabs!”. How would he manage/organize hundreds of tabs in multiple applications with a snapping tiling manager? He can’t. It is fun from there. Like, he jokes after a work day (week) his desktop also has “sedimentary layers”.

Now I want to see an annotated print screen of his desktop. Spatially organizing the desktop reminds me of Eagle Mode, which kind of works but it gets weird first zooming into the filesystem to then zoom into the menus to find a command to run/open the file. After that it almost sounds like he touches on how the acme editor lays out "windows" in columns for his kill-app that "no one wants", amazing

Because Apple hasn't invented tiling windows yet? It'll be revolutionary when it does, though, I'm sure.

Sure they have. It’s in the iPad, though it only supports two application level windows the applications may tile within themselves.

Even Windows has had a basic level of built-in window tiling functionality for a decade now. You can resize windows to half or a quarter of the screen either with keyboard shortcuts or dragging the window to a side or corner. It works pretty well.

Tiling and cascading Windows was available in Win 3.0. And it was available to MDI apps all that time as well so a lot longer than a decade.

Tiling was all that was available in Win 1.0! Absolute best tiling WM for your 286.

Wasn't tiling the only option in Windows 1.x, other than full screen?

Well it didn’t support overlapping windows so those are the only remaining options.

Tiling horizontally or vertically are unfortunately gone in Windows 10. In Windows 7 (or Vista?) it was removed from the taskbar entry context menu, but you could still do it from Task Manager.

yeah I was a bit shocked to finally understand the purpose of that feature 20 years after the fact

window snaping IIRC, which is to me, the most interesting UI idea MS had since win95. It is damn intuitive and efficient.

Say I want one window to take up all vertical space on the left third of the screen and another to take up the other two thirds, is there a way to do this without me having to manually resize both windows?

I switch between i3 at home and windows at work and that’s one of the things I really miss

Another thing I miss is having a detached window permanently on top

There's probably a better way but I would put a window in each half using winkey+arrows and then drag the center divider to resize them both at once.

Hmmm

Dragging the center divider doesn’t work in my use case (detached eclipse console window on one side) I have to resize both windows manually

to be clear: it works as expected with two browser windows, it’s the type of window eclipse creates when you detach a view that windows doesn’t seem to like

When you resize a window in MacOS it is already builtin that it is aware of the edges of inactive windows. The edges of the active window you are resizing will very lightly snap to the edges of other windows, such that is nearly impossible to make two windows either separated or overlapping by only a couple pixels.

It's too bad that there isn't at least a hidden property in `defaults` to adjust the intensity of the snapping. Hammerspoon and Karabiner work well for the type of audience found on HN, but coding your own customizations can seem like a lot of work, and there are still some unnecessary limitations to what you can do.

Bettersnaptool makes it work like windows, drag and hold toolbar and it'll snap to the closest edge

I started using Chunk a few months ago. I'd been using i3 for a few years and loved it, but my main OS is macOS.

I mapped my caps as HYPER (like most), but I really wish MacOS had a method to acquire a true native SUPER key. I'm currently using ctrl+shift+alt-arrows for resizing, ctrl+alt-arrows for movement, HYPER + arrows for selection --- but its just not as smooth as i3.

The more I use Linux w/ i3, the more I realize that MacOS is very much a cursor OS -- at least with window management. And in this respect, MacOS is way behind the competition.

> I realize that Macos is very much a cursor OS

I used to hate that fact, until I got a keyboard without numpad. The smaller distance between keyboard and mouse makes a huge difference.

I realized, that the mouse is actually faster in many situations. I still use Vim, Launchbar, Magnet and 'CMD Shift /' (Menubar search), but now I am far less annoyed when I do need to switch to the mouse.

I went TKL a few years back and have the same feelings as you. I also switched to a Magic Trackpad 2 -- which has been somewhat life changing (to some extent.)

It took about a week or so to get comfortable with, and I haven't gone crazy with the gestures -- but its such a nice experience.

The funniest thing about MacOS window managers is that a lot of them can't do three windows stacked (not in the i3 sense) on the left side with one window on the right. This is what ultimately lead me to chunkwm. Prior to that I was using BetterTouchTool with zones.

TKL above means "tenkeyless", i.e., without a numeric keypad.

Does anyone make left-handed keyboards with the numpad and the PageUp, etc. block of keys on the left? I saw a positively ancient one at a friend's parent's house years ago, but that's it. That would solve the problem of moving the mouse closer, while still having a full keyboard. It would also put the numpad closer to the Tab key.

Alternatively, I could use the mouse with my left hand. My friend actually did this when I suggested it as a joke, and apparently it didn't take long for him to get used to it. However, I generally don't like ambidextrous mice.

Alternatively, I could use a ten key less keyboard and get a separate wireless numpad.

A while ago there was a 65% 'Southpaw' keyboard on reddit -- https://www.reddit.com/comments/75djfk

There are others if you do a search for left-handed keyboards.

Shameless plug: I just released https://highlyopinionated.co/swish, which includes 2x2 and 2x3 window tiling through two-finger swiping on the window's titlebar or the app's dock icon. It's primarily designed for Magic Trackpads and is faster (and more accurate on a multi-monitor setup) than any dragging-based window manager and — in my honest opinion — fits pretty well into Apple's design philosophy.

The way I always thought of it is that Apple designs for as little window micromanagement as possible. When using macOS I’ve found myself most productive when I just kind of forget about precisely controlling windows and just let them exist wherever.

I use the magnet app for this. Works perfectly when needed.

Interestingly I don't use it that often on my laptop's screen, but for my 34" widescreen it's a must have.

Thanks, I didn't know about Magnet till you mentioned it. It looks like it's a lot better on an iMac than MBPs, because when you try to split the screen vertically some apps need to be wider than half of a 13" screen.

+1 for Magnet. Been using it for a while and it works like a charm.

My take is that Apple kind of invented the overlapping windows paradigm, the Xerox Alto didn’t have that concept, IIRC.

Also, dragging something from the desktop and dropping on a floating window was a major breakthrough, which is kind of incompatible with a split screen model.

Personally, on small screens like the original Mac, I think the floating/overlapping WM worked perfectly. On a 30” however, it’s a bit silly.

The original iPad had 4x the resolution of the original Mac yet the iPad was full screen only and now supports some kind of tiling. Based on some historical writings I wonder if overlapping windows were a gimmick that became the default.

The iPad is also single-app, and touch based. This is significantly different from multi-window/multi-app with a precision pointing device like a mouse. The windowing use-cases aren't the same.

The original iPad screen physical size was actually rather similar to that of the original Mac.

And apps often felt way too big on it. The calculator was so comically stretched that they couldn’t bring themselves to ship it.

Full screen only is a simple yet overly contraining model.

  Apple kind of invented the overlapping windows paradigm

They preceded the X Window System?

They do, because X Windows System was the winner of the UNIX UI wars, there were plenty of more interesting UIs, even on UNIX world, like SunView.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Origin_and_ear... - X announced in June 1984

The Macintosh was introduced in January 1984

There's a great piece of software called Amethyst that gives you decent window tiling that can be configured to function similarly to XMonad and other window managers. It's really just using the current window manager and automates window size and placement, but works well enough.

Window snapping and tiling doesn’t really scale past maybe 6 windows. Once you go past that, you need to start hiding windows or using virtual desktops. And the random access of an arbitrary window when you have many dozens of them is tedious with a keyboard. With a mouse you have spatial memory of where you put the window.

I always feel claustrophobic without virtual desktops. I use them to split out windows in groups according to task, with keyboard switching for speed.

i3 and Vim let me keep my hands off the mouse.

Six windows on the same screen? That's way too crowded; I rarely have more than three. Virtual desktops are natural to use, don't enjoy working without them. I use i3wm and often move between windows using the mouse.

You can easily fit 6 windows of apps that aren't wasteful of screen space on one monitor, even without overlapping them. I find that quality Mac apps scale gracefully, whereas things like Gnome 3 apps have giant CSD chrome and don't scale particularly well. And if you do overlap windows, you can fit even more if you arrange them well so they're easy to access quickly.

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