Hacker News Reader

Comment by Macha | Hacker News Reader

Window management is one area where this is definitely not true. Window snapping is something people have to install Spectacle/Rectangle for and even then shortcuts to move windows to workspaces are sorely missing for me.

View on HN

Both are woefully behind a good Xorg based window manager. i3 blows Windows and OSX window management out of the water, no matter what add-on is installed.

It's dangerous though, one of my biggest fears is getting a job that won't let me use Linux.

I just won't take that job.

Oh I know. I use Windows (gaming), OS X (work) and Linux with i3 (most personal use) all on regular basis. i3 is obviously my preference for window management but my feeling is even Windows is noticeably ahead of OS X here.

i3 and similar tiling WMs sound nice in theory, but any time I tried them I ended up frustrated by the sheer number of windows that don't tile nicely and thus the high number of floating windows in a window manager designed to tile. At least for me, WMs designed to float by default with tiling as the optional mode work much better.

What applications were those? Maybe it's worth reporting a bug (either with i3 or the application in question)?

I'm asking because it's been a long time since I encountered an application which didn't tile nicely / didn't work well with i3[^]. Besides, you can always make a window float in i3.

[^] With the exception of the Android emulator but that thing is a monster for a whole bunch of reasons.

Even a lot of video games tile well these days, which wasn't the case a few years ago.

I think literally the only things I have that don't tile are some of my Ludum Dare games because it's a 48 hour game jam so I don't have time to make them handle resizing or anything other than windowed 720p.

Oh, and native Terraria 1.4 (Proton Terraria 1.4 tiles just fine though).

I'm not OP. But when I read his reply I got the impression they meant "windows that aren't useful when tiled". Like a laptop screen with three horizontal windows, each window is too tall and narrow to be useful. It's a pretty valid complaint against tiling window managers IMO. When I'm on a laptop, I tend to switch to i3's tabbed mode instead of tiling (or one window per virtual desktop).

Try BetterTouchTool. It has window snapping built-in and it has all sorts of options for hotkey actions for snapping and moving windows between desktops.

Also you can use it to get middle click on a MacBook trackpad and to completely customize the touchbar in quite complex ways (doesn't even require disabling SIP to do that).

It would be nice if a third-party tool wasn't required, but I think it's worth the cost (and if you owned BetterSnapTool in the past, it actually costs nothing extra to upgrade the license).

This is one of the nicer utilities that I have paid for. It absolutely increases the usability of my $2k computer.

BetterTouchTool uses enough consistent cpu usage even with almost no settings enabled that I stopped using it. I’ve had inconsistent personal luck with computers after 5 years. I’ve just past that point with my MacBook.

I understand it needs to be doing some things in the background, but on the other hand, Hammerspoon and Karabiner don’t use much cpu usage.

I could be doing it wrong. Not knowing how to better manage apps, cpu usage, and so on

Agreed. And why is the default behavior of the green maximize button to make things fullscreen? I never see people use fullscreen in real life

I use fullscreen pretty frequently on laptops with certain apps. For instance, right now Mailplane is open fullscreen in one virtual desktop, and Slack is open fullscreen in another. While I sometimes feel like I'm an outlier, when I joked on Twitter about being the only person who used fullscreen, I got a surprising amount of replies from people saying "wait, is that uncommon? I use it all the time."

Actually, I frequently had Slack and Mailplane open in the "split pane full screen" mode on my 27" monitor at work back when going into the office was a thing, so it's not just a laptop thing, either.

I use fullscreen fairy frequently (or the sister functionality: split-pane). I also like the classic zoom functionality (which tries to intelligently size the window based on content).

The Windows "maximize" functionality is something I almost never use, on any platform.

Spectacle is nice and simple (3rd party)

Rectangle is another like Spectacle but adds window snapping.

I'm aware of both of these and mentioned them in my post. Personally I use Rectangle on my OS X machines and did use Spectacle until my 2015 MBP died. When setting up my replacement, I noticed Spectacle was abandoned and moved to Rectangle.

It still baffles me why every year Apple churns out bad UI changes for MacOS and at no point puts in window snapping.

To be fair, 10.12 Sierra introduced a snap-to-edge-of-screen feature when moving a window, which I feel was a good first step.

Me too! Why do I have to use a third party app to snap my windows? It’s so cumbersome pressing the green button, clicking which side you want the app on, clicking which app you want on the other side. When you exit, one app goes full screen. It’s maddening.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com