Hacker News Reader

Comment by leokennis | Hacker News Reader

Probably unrelated observation. I use a MacBook for personal use and a Windows laptop for work.

For many things, they both work well in general (Windows is better for "document stuff" and file management, Mac a little better in window management etc., but comparable in general).

But when it comes to media stuff (think: cropping a lossless audio file and compressing the result into an AAC or MP3, resizing 20 images, transcoding a movie from one format to the other, removing one page from a PDF), on Mac it can usually be done with built in tools. On Windows you often need either a prohibitively expensive software suite or go on an ad infested crapware hunt resulting in a borderline unusable tool.

View on HN

> Mac a little better in window management

Can you elaborate on this? I've been using a Mac for work for a couple of years now and I find the out-of-the-box window management experience pretty bad compared to Windows. No snapping to sides or corners, no quick resize to standard sizes other than maximum, and most importantly no easy way to change between multiple windows of the same program using keyboard shortcuts. I've been using Magnet [1] and Contexts [2] to improve things, but it's a shame I have to use paid third party apps for basic functionality like this.

[1] https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/ [2] https://contexts.co/

Windows definitely improved significantly with Win10 in this regard. But Exposé (or whatever it's called now) invoked via a swipe gesture is fantastic. Swipe up with 4 fingers and I see all windows. Swipe down with 4 and I see all windows of the current app. Combine this with Spotlight to quickly find and open apps/documents.

But, everyone has a different workflow. I can imagine that if you're a heavier shortcuts user, Windows works better.

Expose is pretty good! But the Windows 10 task view [1] (Windows+Tab) does practically the same thing.

[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-task-view-windows-10

Spotlight is great and puts Windows 10's search to shame, although it feels like it has gotten worse in the past few years.

I found Spectacle (since replaced by Rectangle [0], I hear?) to be a treasure in this regard. Key bindings to maximize and resize, and even change what desktop a window is on.

I picked it because it was closest to the window-snapping / sizing bindings I had in XFCE years ago, but it basically makes OSX window management no longer frustrating.

0: https://rectangleapp.com/

It might not be quite what you want, but Command-(Shift-)-` should cycle through an app’s windows.

Only works if your keyboard layout includes backtick unfortunately.

At least on Gnome (which AFAIK copied this from Mac) it's actually mapped to "the key above Tab", even if that key is something other than backtick.

They improved it on copying, this does not work in MacOS.

You can change the shortcut in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Keyboard > Move focus to next window.

Try also using “Move focus to active or next window”. I have that mapped to Option-Command-` (and implicitly Option-Shift-Command-` for reverse order).

Contexts is nice but hasn't been updated since 2018! If you know a similar nice alternative, let me know.

They have said they're working on a Big Sur compatible version (it works currently, but the rendering is a bit broken).

That's fine by me to be honest—I paid for it once and it's done everything I need it to ever since.

> no easy way to change between multiple windows of the same program using keyboard shortcuts

CMD + ` (backtick)

I used various window management helpers over the years but recently settled on Hammerspoon.

This is my experience as well. I recently bought a Windows machine since a very long time as I want access to all 3 big operating systems (Mac, Windows, Linux). I forgot how terrible Windows can be with downloading stuff from the internet.

I wanted to download a program so that I could control my fans a bit better. Before I knew it, it took over my browser and would redirect me to other sites, couldn't remove the program either. Norton didn't do its job, and I didn't do mine because I probably unchecked one box too few during the installation process. The only way to fix this was to wipe the disk completely.

I've never had this experience on Mac or Linux.

Sounds like the problem exists between keyboard and chair.

Executing strange binary files from untrusted sources could ruin your day on Mac and Linux as well. It is only less common because market share is so small compared to Windows, and as such these systems are less of a target.

How do you establish that a binary is trustworthy?

I know what I do, I generally try to find user reviews, but someone had to install it first.

You can upload the binary to virustotal and see if it got flagged.

Oh, that’s an interesting tool. Thanks.

Just as a heads up to anyone out there, if you ever get infected run Malwarebytes (free) first and that should probably fix your woes or else you can download bitdefender (also free) and run that. I see a lot of people using norton or whatever else and imo they're all just a waste of resources and time.

I personally just uninstall Malwarebytes and bitdefender after I clean up and make sure windows defenders up and running and I'm ready to download all kinds of shit off the internet again.

I think the best way to find niche software on windows is to search for open source alternatives.

Making a system restore point from time to time can help greatly too on windows! (make sure you change the setting so that it doesn't delete your old system restore points due to low disk space making the whole thing useless)

I think that if you have malware, then formatting of hard drive is minimum of what should be done.

I would not assume that malware is actually purged, and unpacking backup archive and running script to reinstall software is not so troublesome (assuming that you have backups and script to automate installing your programs, but if you are on HN then you probably have it)

Well, I normally do :P But this was a fairly fresh install, so I didn't set it up yet.

I use Clonezilla for backups.

> But when it comes to media stuff (think: cropping a lossless audio file and compressing the result into an AAC or MP3, resizing 20 images, transcoding a movie from one format to the other, removing one page from a PDF), on Mac it can usually be done with built in tools.

Which tools are these? On Mac I ended up using Audacity for cropping audio files, ffmpeg (cli) to compress it, and used either ffmpeg or Handbrake for transcoding. I don't remember what I used for pdf page split/combine, but I do remember that it was a pain.

Honest question - as I still use Mac occasionally, it'd be great to know what are those builtin tools so I can actually use the features the OS has.

For cropping audio files, QuickTime can do it. Look in its menus. Also transcoding video files (to what extent this might be “compression” depends on your use case).

PDF page manipulation is the easiest thing on macOS, also quite robust usually. Just open the document in Preview and open the page sidebar. You can reorder or remove pages there; or drag and drop pages from other documents.

>For cropping audio files, QuickTime can do it. Look in its menus. Also transcoding video files

Quicktime Pro could do this all very well, Quicktime X however? It can trim but the UI is bad and encoding options are so limited I stopped using it all together.

It often comes to what we are used to. I switched from Windows to Mac on purpose: being a 20+ years Windows power user (software engineer) I wanted to learn a Mac to be a bit more versatile. It took me a year just to be decent MacOS user and I stil "hate it". For me Windows is still better, as for me it is easier and I know all the tools, etc.

I am still to discover a built in set of tools on either platform. I use 3rd party to accomplish my daily tasks on both.

On a very basic level Quicktime can do that. And Preview lets you easily remove pages from PDFs - select the page in the sidebar, press Delete.

Apart from that, more advanced 1st party apps for editing (for certain values of advanced) are available free - iMovie for video, GarageBand for audio, Pages for documents, etc.

I personally know people who switched to Mac because of Print/Save as PDF. Not just because of that but it was the proverbial last straw. (That was before it was built in in Windows.)

> Mac a little better in window management

I need to echo the sibling comment. I was overwhelmed with how bad Mac window management is in a multi-monitor setup. This is compounded by Apple's apparent hatred of keyboard shortcuts and power users. Speaking to my longtime Mac-loving coworkers, they displayed Sapir-Whorf-like inability to understand why the missing features/behaviors are even a problem.

In a the Covid/WFH world, I'm happy to let the 16" MBP collect dust while I use computers that adapt to me, rather than forcefully adapting myself to one particular computer's eccentricities.

ffmpeg is open source and cross-platform, no need for infested crapware.

GUI apps are easier to pick up and learn than CLI commands with cryptic namings.

You end up using FFMPEG all the time on Mac anyway because the built in tools only really support apple approved formats and if you're dealing with video being captured from elsewhere you end up with piles of webm containers full on non-apple endorsed codecs.

Didn't use to be this way in the QuickTime Pro ecosystem but since QuickTime X you can't just work with any old video files.

Meh, pick your poison. I was just pointing out there are more alternatives than crapware and expensive tools.

I still remember how bewildered I was when I realized how easy it was on my first Mac to trim or convert an audio file, crop or resize a picture, build a pdf from images or sign a damn pdf ^^

> On Windows you often need either a prohibitively expensive software suite or go on an ad infested crapware hunt resulting in a borderline unusable tool.

For basic audio/video stuff on Windows, try http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/

I've used FFMPEG for these kind of things with no problem on Windows and *nix systems.

If your willing to spend the money Adobe Media Encoder works perfectly fine on Windows as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com