SensibleSideButtons – side navigation for third-party mice in macOS
sensible-side-buttons.archagon.net
sensible-side-buttons.archagon.net
Rectangle is a fork of the now unmaintained Spectacle. I was using Spectacle for as very long time.
It's super cheap, and on top of the regular shortcuts, you can create custom shortcuts with their own specific positions, and it saves them per screen. I currently have a dozen of custom shortcuts, which is super handy for an ultrawide 38 inch screen.
I personally find this more useful for quickly changing Windows and moving then between spaces.
> I discovered that the side buttons emitted standard M4 and M5 commands just as they did in Windows
But there's no way of setting that up in Logitech's ‘Control Center’; ‘middle click’ is as fancy as that gets. If I'm lucky, I can use Control Center to set up a custom configuration for the specific application in question and make mouse buttons emulate keyboard events, then map those hotkeys to the desired actions within the application. But if the program doesn't allow custom hotkeys for triggering something that's meant to be done with extra mouse buttons, I'm pretty much out of luck.
You don't even get the standard mouse button events when you don't install Control Center at all — then the extra buttons (on my particular older model; no idea about current Logitech products) do nothing at all :(
So the funny thing is: I'd need a ‘sensible side buttons’ hack that does the exact opposite of this one.
Steermouse the easiest to use with most functionality so far compared to Sensible Side Buttons, USB Overdrive, ControllerMate. I tried out Steermouse for past couple of weeks. Just paid for it yesterday... but noticed the CPU usage today.
The shortcuts 'ctrl -' and 'ctrl shift -' are the default for 'go back' and 'go forward' being supported even in many apps (including that don't support the gestures), and since they are keyboard shortcuts you can usually add support for them in apps by rebinding the shortcuts for back and forward (or anything else you want to bind in that particular software).
Half baked mouse support, awful windows management with incongruent fullscreen functionality, half baked multi monitor integration, terrible thermals/performance, and the removal of anti-aliased text made MacOS a generally poor desktop experience for me.
Some of these problems can be ameliorated by third party apps, but I get the impression the desktop experience (and maybe more generally MacOS) has not been a concern at Cupertino for some time.
I'm afraid I don't understand the premise, given that the experience is the same.
The number of random apps that I have to install because of odd quirks that don't work like I'd want/expect. The most egregious IMO is no support for mouse4/5 as back/forward (seriously, it's 2020.... every mouse has some form of theses unless explicitly designed not to), but it goes past that. The first two months of using my mac as a desktop, about weekly I would run into the case that something wouldn't work as expected, I'd google it, and find a stackexchange post where someone is like "yeah that behavior is intentional, no way to change it, by the way I wrote this little open source tool to fix this."
My mac sits on my desk, but faces opposite of me because I want to be able to charge it in the right port, not the left. Left port seems to make my kernel_task go crazy. Two monitors (using an HP workstation thunderbolt dock) seem to make the fans go nuts as well.
Maybe I need a desktop form of Apple hardware, but lol $5999.
Luckily the OS is somewhat extensible, but I fully agree that the desktop experience feels half baked at best. Easily the worst out of Windows, OSX, and Ubuntu (defaults).
All of these features pose significant issues on a desktop that utilizes multiple monitors, large screen real estate per monitor, a mouse, and sub 1440p displays. They all are considerably less important factors on a laptop that commonly utilizes a trackpad and a single retina resolution screen with limited real estate.
Half baked mouse support, awful windows management with incongruent fullscreen functionality, half baked multi monitor integration, terrible thermals/performance, and the removal of anti-aliased text made MacOS a generally poor desktop experience for me.
Some of these problems can be ameliorated by third party apps, but I get the impression the desktop experience (and maybe more generally MacOS) has not been a concern at Cupertino for some time.
I guess most users never discover these limitations but between this, the absence of window snapping (and associated key shortcuts), and the terrible external monitor support it’s hard not to regret the move when I stare at my (admittedly very pretty) laptop.
I get that most reviewers aren’t really heavy users, and seem to think (like Apple) that a “pro” user is someone who works exclusively in photo and video editing, but I need to get my work done.
It’s really disheartening that they don’t seem to understand these types of problems.
But hey, at least they’re giving us Escape keys back.
What exactly is terrible here? IME macOS is the only OS that can cope with multiple monitors of different DPIs in a sane manner, and deal with restoring window locations after temporarily switching from laptop-screen-only to external display usage.
I have three identical 1080P displays on my desk. On Windows, and it's one example of a bunch of little things, I can press Windows key and an arrow to expand the current Window to half a display - I press it again and it snaps to the next half, and does so across screens - so I can really quickly expand my workspace to fill the screen area depending on the task I'm working on (one or two key presses).
There's not way for me to do this on macOS even without keyboard shortcuts. There's no reason for this, and what's worse, with side-by-side view this experience should be better than Windows for me as I'm never working on less than half a display per window - but it's just un-necessarily painful.
It would take no time at all to bind side-by-side snapping to keypresses and have it operate predictably across multiple displays but they just don't do it, won't allow me to, and I don't understand why.
It really is wild to me. It's like nobody ever used two monitors or needed two apps side by side...
Rectangle [1] is free. Spectacle [2] before that was free. There are several other choices for window snapping in OS X and have been since the earliest days. Personally I use Magnet [3], which was some trivial amount of money many years ago and comes from the App Store - thus has no "nagware" aspect.
FWIW the built-in Windows snapping support is terrible - if you have a 49" widescreen display, you'll find it can't snap windows to thirds of the screen and you're back to (true) "bloat and nagware" of third party Windows utilities.
> It's like nobody ever used two monitors or needed two apps side by side...
Since ~2002 I've had setups that range between 2 and 6 monitors - mostly 3. I've used Windows, Linux, macOS and OpenSolaris in that timeframe, and have found macOS to be _by far_ the least hassle for getting whatever monitor configuration I have wanted.
Still a far cry from Win10, where it’s automatic by dragging to the side of the screen, where you have quarters, hotkeys, auto resize etc.
What is terrible about the external monitor support?
Window snapping is a cool feature, I'm sure, but how long has it even existed on Windows or common Linux distributions...? (This is a genuine question; I have only heard about it in the last few months, and I have no idea how long it has been present.)
You might as well say that a menu bar at the top of the screen is "basic functionality" (is it even possible to replicate that in Windows?), or Emacs keybinds in system textboxes are "basic functionality."
Different OSes have different features, and a blind assumption that something that has become a part of your workflow is a necessary part of every OS just seems arrogant to me.
And I don't have a clue what you mean about "terrible external monitor support". I have never had a problem with multiple monitors on Macs, while when I have to deal with even one on Windows, I regularly have to struggle with driver issues and the OS thinking that one of its several interfaces is the "primary" one that you have to plug into first, and it won't even consider outputting on another interface without being explicitly told to.
Like no copy and paste in iOS? Apple has a history of not adding features just because no matter how useful they would be and no matter how much it is holding back its users. That is arrogant, not the user asking for features that is standard for most.
> the OS thinking that one of its several interfaces is the "primary" one that you have to plug into first, and it won't even consider outputting on another interface without being explicitly told to.
This is just wrong. Windows since at least windows xp shows something on all screens as default. You sound like a Mac user who doesn't know Windows. FYI I use Linux primarily so unlike you I'm not biased (I think both has it uses but both also suck).
Oh, yes, thank you for telling me my personal experiences don't exist.
I have had this happen to me on multiple occasions when setting up Windows—XP and later—machines with multiple display interfaces. Plug into VGA—nothing. Plug into one of the DisplayPorts—nothing. Plug into the other DisplayPort—OK, there's the primary. (Or, worse, plug into the bizarre double-DVI with a special adapter, that one's the primary.)
Because indeed, most people I see using macs professionally tend to be artists (photo and video editors but also musicians, designers, architects,...). But from my experience tech workers and engineers are more likely to use PCs unless there is some special need (ex: iOS dev).
Edit: Downvoted, as expected. But it is not a troll. I recognize that MacBook pros have really nice features, like a second to none trackpad, nice screen, nice SSD,... Plus it looks good and it "just works". Artists like it a lot and I understand them. But for tech and engineering work, ThinkPads seem to be preferred. They are robust laptops with great keyboards and better connectivity. If computing power is required, powerful desktops and workstation class laptops tend to be used. Finally, for office work, Macs are often considered too expensive.
It mostly just works and I can focus on writing my applications and operating my systems. I get a nice UNIX-like ecosystem on the metal and almost everything I need to write code I can get on Homebrew.
It runs Docker for those times when I want actual Linux locally, although I've been using that less and less since I can build and run my containers on the cloud.
I haven't counted but I suspect more than half of my IT colleagues use Macs, and almost everyone else uses Linux. Windows is the exception, where the only people crazy enough to inflict that upon themselves tend to be .NET/C#/F#/Microsoft-oriented devs.
macOS is the most hassle-free experience you can get. I say that whilst keeping a very close eye on Linux development since I'd like to break away from Apple eventually. Unfortunately no Linux distro comes even close to Macs in terms of simplicity and reliability.
The ecosystem sucked me in. I got an Apple Watch and iPhone for the first time not long ago for other reasons (mostly I need to track swimming and could not for the life of me find a decent non-Apple smart watch that would do this for me). The integration between the iPhone and the MBP - as basic as it is - has been a massive productivity boost for me. Just having the call handling route through my laptop when I'm at the desk is a huge convenience feature that gives me time back.
Is it worth the sum of small issues I keep hitting like this? Sometimes it is, a lot of the time it's not. I'd like to see Apple fix these kind of basic things before making the icons look more like the phone, though.
Craig Federighi said Big Sur is the most significant release since OSX. Sometimes it's hard to distill the engineering from the marketing but I sincerely hope that's not what they really believe as it is desperately in need of another Snow Leopard release. Just spend a year fixing stuff that should never have been broken in the first place.
After a year, I finally heard an unofficial and unconfirmed explanation that the reason is to prevent parent company from hijacking their IT with their own Windows setup that is apparently "known bad".
Still, resulted in me having to deal with mac and finding pain points daily.
I am missing an "always on top" application to pin windows to the top layer - like there is in most Linux distros. Anyone knows a little app that provides this function?
[1]: https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/docs/help/how-to/mouse-b...
No! This looked so useful, but there's so much crap in the menubar now. A pref pane would be better.