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Comment by reflectiv | Hacker News Reader

This is basically what I tell people when they ask me why I put my start menu and task bar on the left side of the screen.

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Exactly. Which to me is why the parent complaint is a bit silly. If vertical space is at such a premium on Mac laptops supposedly, why then does the default Apple UI [1] consume such an enormous amount of vertical space? This is many, many pixels more space than on Windows, where you only have the taskbar at the bottom. Apple's dock is much larger than the taskbar, in addition to having a global bar on the top!

So I conclude that Apple's designers are in fact not attempting to maximize vertical space, or at least that to the extent they do care about this, they're willing to make absurd compromises in apps like Safari while not fixing the glaring issue with the overall UI.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/98/MacOS_Montere...

MacBooks have 16:10 screens, not 16:9, so there is a bit more room. I still hide the dock however.

I find that horizontal space to many times be more constrained. If I toss and IDE and browser window side-by-side so I can code while looking at docs I need to at least close the vertical tabs on my browser to have a sane amount of space left for content. Usually also collapse one of the sidebars in the IDE to get a decent width for the code.

Clearly horizontal space is going to be more constrained than vertical space if you put two windows next to each other horizontally, as you're going from 16:9 to 8:9. But if you stacked them vertically, well obviously vertical space would be even more constrained than that, to the point where it's so useless you don't even think about doing it. So this is an argument for vertical space being more scarce than horizontal space actually.

Maybe all non page UI ought to auto hide until a key is pressed for your use case.

You don't hide the start menu and task bar?

A lot get frustrated with the slide but if you disable animations the autohide becomes instant too.

For what it's worth, you don't need to disable all animations to stop this, just the menu ones.

https://superuser.com/a/1644831

That's actually a fantastic tip, thanks!

Hiding it usually works.

Unfortunately on Windows there's this annoying slide-out animation that slows you down. It happens even if you disable UI animation.

On top of that sometimes the bar doesn't show up at all when specific windows are maximized. Which means you need to press the start button to get it out.

At some point one figures "f this shit, just toggle off auto-hide".

I do autohide in macOS on laptops tho.

Do you use Mac laptop apps in fullscreen mode? That's what I do so the dock auto-hides. I do however keep the start menu on the right for Windows.

Wow. I hadn't thought of it this way, and I even go as far as using a second monitor in portrait mode.

I have been doing this ever since 16:9 became a thing, and have converted several people to this simple solution.

Canonical had the right idea with Unity which not many people are willing to acknowledge

The Windows task bar has been movable since 95 I believe. I know because I moved it to the top in the old days. With Mate I keep the main panel on the left as well, however some widgets were not happy in vertical orientation until a few years ago.

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