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Comment by mcswell | Hacker News Reader

"title bars that made it impossible to tell active and inactive windows apart": Win10 (and iirc Win 7, I never had Win8) are a mix-and-match. FreeCommander XE (the file manager I use) and Thunderbird both have title bars that change color, and Vivaldi allows it (although the contrast is not as great as I prefer). But none of the MsOffice apps do. I think there's some kind of subtle change they do, maybe a 1 pixel wide border or something that shows up when they have keyboard focus, but I honestly can't tell. As a result, I not infrequently type into (or worse, delete something) from the wrong window.

Also, the title bars on MsOffice apps are so cluttered with controls that you can hardly find a safe place to click on them if you want to select that app with your mouse. Why, for example, is the search bar in Outlook up there, instead of some pop-up dialog box? (And the Outlook and Word search tools themselves are a mess, but I digress...)

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To your last paragraph, my favourite thing about Mac is how if you click a window that doesn't have focus, the click ONLY makes the window focused. If you clicked on a button, it doesn't actually click the button.

A similar thing is what happens when you touch a phone when it dims right before sleeping. Some OSes only let the touch restore brightness, while others will do that AND register a tap wherever you touched. Super annoying IMO.

I think I it would bother me to have to click twice when working back and forth between two windows. Maybe another approach could be to only register the click action if there is no overlap? Then again, the inconsistency would probably be frustrating with that approach.

Fun to see this come up because it is one of my biggest annoyances when switching between MacOS and Linux.

I have focus follows mouse on Linux so it might be an exaggerated problem, but it’s annoying to click a text box and it not actually select the text box.

There is an option in yabai for focus follows mouse, but I had to disable yabai because it’s really awkward and perceptibly slow on macos.

Funny, I use windows and Mac interchangeably, and I completely prefer the windows model.

I use 3 monitors for both, and frequently multi task and the extra click on Mac infuriates me.

Yes, it's a good feature for ease of use and makes things less confusing for my mum but I wish I could change that on Mac.

A really useful feature on MacOS is that you can scroll a window that doesn't have focus by hovering over it and using a mouse with a scroll wheel/surface.

MS - and especially Windows - has always seemed to me a company that takes smart people and makes them do really stupid things. The product culture seems incredibly broken.

It's never been great. But in the past usable versions like XP and 7 would fall out. 8 set a new baseline for idiocracy and user hostility. I see no evidence things have gotten better since.

I suppose - as per earlier comments here - if the culture is top-down design by people who don't even use the product and are trying to Make a Statement for career reasons, the future isn't encouraging.

The real question is what kind of management allows something so obviously nonsensical to happen.

> A really useful feature on MacOS is that you can scroll a window that doesn't have focus by hovering over it and using a mouse with a scroll wheel/surface.

Yeah, Windows has had that too for a while now. Dunno for sure how long; some five years (or eight? Ten?), I'd guess.

Citrix (a remote desktop app) breaks that; apparently no mouse scrolls are sent to an app on the remote desktop until you click in the Citrix window.. Thunderbird partially breaks it: I just tried with TBird in the background: scrolling the list of emails (that works) and the text of a selected email (does not work).

Did that behavior change at some point? I'm on Big Sur and clicking on an unfocused window will focus it and trigger whatever button your mouse landed on.

Edit: it seems to depend on the kind of button(?)

Native buttons and sliders have click-through enabled by default. Users can also ⌘-click to press buttons in background windows without changing the focus.

The developer can make a choice there. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nswindow:

> var worksWhenModal: Bool

> A Boolean value that indicates whether the window is able to receive keyboard and mouse events even when some other window is being run modally.

I think there are flags for doing that for non-modal ‘other windows’, too.

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