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Comment by david-cako | Hacker News Reader

You can also move macOS windows by dragging the border along the opposite axis, with no configuration.

I've been using a Mac since 2010 and someone always points out 'weird' features like this to me on what has to be a monthly basis.

Same with iPhone. My mind was blown when after years of tapping left-arrow someone showed me what happens when you hold down the space key. Or that dragging the iphone chat message app's background to the left reveals the timestamps of each message.

It's all very clever and elegant and minimal but consumer technology user interfaces seem to be converging on that of a Theremin.

TIL about holding the space key!

I so miss the days of the well structured and comprehensive manual. I used to read them end to end. Even if you didn't remember the details you knew what was possible.

So do I, but in entire fairness here that manual for iOS would probably run to three or four thousand pages.

What I really miss is having the time free to peruse a manual like that.

They still write manuals, it's just non-obvious: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/welcome/ios

The specific spacebar trick is even in the manual at https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/iphone/iph3c50f96e/ios

>Touch and hold the Space bar with one finger until the keyboard turns light gray.

>Move the insertion point by dragging around the keyboard.

So the problem is more that OP doesn't read manuals rather than them not being as good as they once were.

I’ve never bought a new iPhone. Is there something included in the box to point people towards the online manuals? I’m making a hopefully safe assumption there wasn’t a manual in the box that GGP ignored.

I just opened my iphone 13 box and there is a paper slip that says "before use, please refer to the user guide <url>" Along with a few of the main safety points printed on the paper itself. When you start the iphone the first thing it makes you do is log in and then click through a series of tips and tricks pages but nothing stops you from clicking next through them without reading. They then put an app on the phone by default called "Tips" which explains all this stuff with images and videos.

At some point you just have to admit that there is realistically nothing more that can be done. Users don't want to read the manual because they can use their phone perfectly fine without it. They might not notice there is a nicer way to move the cursor but it doesn't really matter.

There is a manual and it comes preinstalled as an app out of only around 10 apps on the default screen and yet people still complain about the lack of a manual. I really don't know what they could do other than locking the phone until the user completes a quiz on the manual content.

Same. I just learned that in most apps on iOS/Android if there's something you need to pinch to zoom in/out. Usually a map app.

You can zoom with one finger. Double tap and hold, then move you finger up/down to zoom in/out.

Apparently you've able to do this for 5+ years or something. WTF

Only on Android, not iOS, I think. You've always been able to do this, even longer than you could pinch-zoom. Unfortunately, it seems to be going away—Chrome no longer zooms on double-tap-drag, nor do any of the Samsung apps (Samsung Internet, Photos, etc.).

I have a workaround for you: assistive touch under accessibility allows you to bring up an on-screen two-handle bar which lets you adjust zoom with one hand.

My full workflow for using this is triple click power key to bring up accessibility shortcuts, press assistive touch and then tap on the circle icon to bring up the bar. You can drag it around by dragging the middle and if you drag either bar end it does the “pinch”.

I put smart invert for pseudo dark mode and zoom in the other two accessibility shortcuts to round out the accessibility shortcut menu.

> Only on Android, not iOS

It does work on iOS but seems app-dependent. Works in Apple Maps, doesn't work in Photos.

Bullshit... tries it ... Oh! :-) Thank you!

Says something about discoverability when it seems like I need to RTFM for gestures again.

Is there a manual for these hidden features though? I’d really like to read something exhaustive about available gestures!

See David Pogue's "Missing Manual" series

If you hold down the period key on most keyboards in iOS it'll bring up .com, .org, etc. Saves a little time typing in urls.

Thanks for the space bar tip … wow. Turns out it works when long-pressing any key on the keyboard.

yeah the mac, with the not even hand gestures, but almost nods and winks at things, is too stupid. If I'm 20 and want to seem hip, and spend 20 hours a day on my phone, then sure, maybe, I think that's cool.

But for the rest of the world, it's not. My mom can't use an iphone or android phone, because they cater too much to... the young? the rich? tech? geeks?

beats me... and I am a dev of > 30 years, that spends more of my time in front of my computer, than almost anyone I know. I love computers and tech, but am amazed that things have not become easier.

They are harder now then they ever were.

But having said that, Macs are all I've used for the last 10 years, because they seem, overall, better than any other OS I've used.

What left arrow?

Along the opposite axis? Can you elaborate?

Drag the left or right border of a window up or down.

If you grab the right-hand edge of a window, you can drag it left or right to resize the window. However, if you instead drag it up or down, you can move the whole window.

And if you hold option (alt) when dragging left or right, it will mirror the drag on the opposite side, so you can quickly expand or contract the window size

This is incredible, thank you for posting this.

A few things I've discovered after playing with this for a few minutes:

It works for the corners too - option+drag the corner of a window, and the whole thing resizes symmetrically.

Hold shift and it preserves the aspect ratio of the window

Double click + holding option on an edge will expand both edges to full screen size

You can hold and release option / shift while dragging and it'll work as you'd expect.

Wait... you can actually maximise without going full screen? I thought Apple would never back down on that - I use a third-party app to do this usually. If there's a similar thing to let me make a window full height and half width, and to center a window, I can get rid of that app altogether...

That seems to be the case!

Double clicking on an edge will cause it to expand to the edge of the window. The shift + option trick doesn't just expand to the first edge it hits, it looks like both edges expand as much as possible.

So when combined with double clicking on a window corner, that makes all for edges expand to display size (even if the window was partially off the monitor).

You can also double click the title bar, or option-click the green full screen button to maximize to the current window.

For me, double-clicking the title bar minimizes a window.

That’s a specific setting, under Settings > Dock & Menu Bar > Double-click a window’s title bar to zoom | minimize. It should default to zoom on a fresh install.

Excellent, thanks — that's very helpful! It's not quite perfect — it does the old 'make it big, but not as big as possible' behaviour that macOS used to do, but that seems to be app-specific, so it actually does what I want for some things.

Holding Option when clicking the green maximize button will expand the window without entering full screen mode. You know you're doing it right if the glyph inside the button turns from two triangles to a plus sign.

When I do this with for instance a Finder window, it just "zooms" it. You can get the same effect if you go to the Window menu -> Zoom. "zoom"ing tells macos to make the window fit the content that's inside of it, however the app feels like doing that, even if you damn well just want the window to be as big as it can be.

BUT, option + double-clicking any window corner will actually make even a Finder window take up the whole visible space of the screen without being "maximized" (without creating a new screen / workspace).

(double-clicking any corner will make the window expand all the way towards the corner you've clicked; if you have a finder window in the middle of the screen and you double-click the NE corner, it'll get bigger in the N and E directions until it hits the menu bar + the right edge of the screen.

similarly, double-clicking any edge will make the window expand all the way to the border of the screen in the direction of the edge you clicked, and option + double-clicking an edge makes it grow both in that direction and the opposite.)

completely undiscoverable, I feel like I'm lost while Maniac Mansion, just trying every possible Verb + Object (+ Indirect Object) combination to try to read the game dev's mind.

> completely undiscoverable, I feel like I'm lost while Maniac Mansion, just trying every possible Verb + Object (+ Indirect Object) combination to try to read the game dev's mind.

I just found out that Apple has a pretty neat guide on all of this [1]. That you can find by googling or searching the builtin system help. I never looked at the system help before, but it looks like Apple did a good job documenting these features. Maybe I should start to RTFM for my OS...

I still agree on the discoverability part but I can't think of a way that would be better. It makes sense that there isn't a button for these commands, but if there isn't you need a manual or a tutorial and who is going to look at these? Maybe someone smarter has a better idea on how to solve this.

[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/work-with-app-windo...

I browsed through the guide a bit, but it seems to be anything but comprehensive, rather it's quite similar to comment threads like this where there's a smattering of less-well-known hidden functionality among the more obvious stuff.

> I still agree on the discoverability part but I can't think of a way that would be better.

In Emacs, C-h m runs `describe-mode` which goes through the major mode of the current buffer and all the currently active minor modes, and puts their descriptions and all the mode-specific key/mouse bindings into a new Help buffer.

It would probably be incredible overkill, but I'd adore an overlay view in macos where each screen widget / distinct region had an outline or different shaded color overlaid on it, and when you hover each widget it shows you all the "keymaps" / event bindings for it. Give me all the knowledge; I use Emacs by choice for crying out loud.

Wow. The things you learn! I've never seen this! What a cool tool!

And, apparently, double click on an edge without holding any keys will expand just that edge out as far as possible.

By convention on Macs option more generally means "anchor at the center." The selection tool in a proper Mac graphics program, for example, will pin the center of the selection to the point where you clicked instead of pinning a corner there. Resizing shapes in a well-made diagramming app behaves this way too. Been this way since the '80s.

There are some paradigms like this option-drag-resizes-both-sides one which have antecedents at least as far back as MacDraw circa 1984.

AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH

OMG THANK YOU

This is amazing. Over a decade using OSX and I never knew this

Oooh, I think this is why I always move my full screen browser window down by a few pixels by accident.

But you can't drag left or right first. If you do, you won't be able to move the window. You either have to decide which one you want to do on the first click.

It's nice that once you get it moving, you can drag on any axis.

Feels really finnicky to get the window moving this way. Does someone actually use this as their workflow?

I don’t use it on purpose, but it happens sometimes by accident and always surprises me.

It's frustratingly difficult to do this via the right edge, if there's a scrollbar there.

Which is pretty ironic when the scroll bars are so elusive when you actually want to drag them

Oh... I have scrollbars permanently shown rather than only on-hover. I should've mentioned that — maybe it affects things.

I haven't dragged a scroll bar in any OS since windows XP. When do you find it's necessary/convenient?

It can still be a lot more efficient to grab the scrollbar to jump to a section of a large document. For example, you can instantly get to say 3/4 of the way through by moving the scroll bar a very short distance, which when done with the scroll wheel or trackpad gestures could take a very long time.

The scroll bar is also sometimes a nice visual cue to the size of a document you've just opened for the first time, again something the wheel/gestures don't necessarily inform.

I have permanent scroll bars enabled in macOS too.

Related hint: Instead of dragging the scroll bar slider, you can also just option+click on the place of the scrollbar that you want to jump to.

Some old apps have a 'slow' scroll if you just roll the wheel. Moving around large documents in them is a zen koan, designed to break your brain.

Many graphics tablets don't have scroll on the pen.

Looking at this very page! Using the middle mouse button takes me 3 or 4 seconds to move somewhere close to the bottom of the page, much faster and less frustrating to grab and drag the scroll bar. Is there some easier method I'm missing?

It is pretty much required if your primary interaction with the computer is through a drawing tablet. My Wacom has a touch-sensitive wheel on it but it's usually a lot more natural to just poke at the scroll bar with the stylus.

I loathe the modern trend towards hiding all scroll bars everywhere because of this.

Sometimes comfortable to drag with thumb trackball

Great tip. I am loving this already.

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