Whatever the green button does is not maximizing.
Still, that's a common reaction from people who use Windows. I've used both Mac and Windows on a near-daily basis for the past ~30 years. Both have spent roughly equal amounts of time as my dominant platform. My observation is that maximising is such a default behaviour on Windows that most apps seem to be developed with that mode of operation in mind. Whereas Mac apps tend to be developed without that assumption. This in turn influences how people use apps on these respective platforms.
I have a smaller vertical monitor next to my main monitor which I full-screen my code editor. It looked weird at first but nothing beats having oodles of vertical space, enough to convey entire blocks of code at a time. And even though it's a verticalised widescreen monitor and a comfortably large font, I still have enough width for almost 150 columns of monospaced text—plenty for my personal coding style.
Full-screening code editors on a large horizontal widescreen monitor tends to have no tangible benefit other than to conceal clutter behind a bunch of useless whitespace.
I run VSCode maximized on a 27" monitor, and the editor field is just about wide enough for 150 columns, with all this other stuff.
(Sadly my code editor of choice doesn't offer that feature.)
Annoyingly, even at 1440p, the code window gets crowded, if I'm using both the file browser and builtin database client. Luckily you can double-click the tab for the file you're on and everything tucks away nicely.
Though I did grow up obsessing over Windows, so you're right about that.
And for the record, having to hold option to maximize is bullshit. I rarely use fullscreen mode.
Dude, you're missing out. I love using a four-finger swipe on the magic trackpad to quickly jump my side monitor between various spaces: my full screen code editor, a space with two web browser windows (typically showing monitoring tools), and a black screen.
> even at 1440p, the code window gets crowded
I loathe customisation, preferring everything to be as generic and standard as possible, but one thing I have done for my own sanity is assign F16–F19 to hiding and showing sidebars in all the various apps which have them. Typically F16 for left bars, F18 for bottom bars, F19 for right bars.
I know the shortcuts on mac and I don't even use them. alt+tab on Windows and Command-Up on mac are the habits I've been able to remember
Think of it like Cmd-Tab for your side monitor.
1. Open two apps, at least one of which supporting fullscreen.
2. Open three windows in the app that supports fullscreen.
3. Fullscreen one window.
4. Cmd-tab to the other app.
5. Cmd-tab back to the previous app.
If your window from step 3 was maximized (filling the screen in the same desktop space), you would return to that window, but instead you are now looking at some completely random other window that you were not interacting with at all.
For people who cmd-tab (and cmd-`) frequently to switch between apps, this is super jarring and not at all what we intended to do.
And I'm reminded by other posters that they changed it to full screening (which is also not maximizing), complete with a disorienting animation, ugh. Pretty happy being Mac free again.
It's supposed to be "smart", in a sense that it gives you the largest window size that it considers usable. But that's too subjective an assessment to enable it by default, and even more so to not make it configurable at all.