Also I have many friends and family members who use macOS and I think none of them have third-party programs installed to modify the UI. So, you won't see them posting here about the extensions that they use.
And Raycast actually has the Rectangle functionality built in, although I prefer the separate app, there are some ‘defaults write’ values I can change on the command line that I like (to give me a wider bottom margin on my screen - I stick Silicio in the corner of my screen for instance.)
Give them both a go.
- Respect for the user: macOS doesn’t show many confirmation messages, notifications, or ad-like things. Apple promotes products in the AppStore or shows you the usual “What’s new” during a new install. But, overall is very respectful, and that includes notifications about OS upgrades. By contrast, Windows is noisy. It asks for confirmation about everything, it has trial crapware in their home editions, and decides to install an OS update without asking in the worst possible moment.
- It just works (at least for the hardware I use). This is my main complain with Linux DEs. I know it improved a lot, but I still have memories of trying to make the Synaptic trackpad driver work or playing with xrandr to use multiple monitors during a presentation.
About the hidden shortcuts… well discoverability should be better. But, is also fun to discover those tricks.
OSX is a wonderful operating system - which is to say, it’s Unix but I can print things and use WiFi properly. I can edit a pdf, etc.
OSX is, in many ways, an absurd operating environment.
If you need any proof of this, just click the little green dot in the upper left of an open window…
It goes full-screen - isn't that an expected outcome?
Not exactly ...
First of all, for most of the life of OSX, clicking the green dot caused the window to resize larger, but not occupy full screen, by some measure I could never discern. That was always braindead.
Second of all, while the current behavior that I see (expand to literally full screen) is sort of an improvement (that is, at least it makes some sense) it's still badly behaved because bringing a window to literally full screen blanks out my other monitors (!@#) ... and now we're drifting into OSX treatment of multi-monitors which is another few layers of hell.
FWIW, IMO, the correct behavior is to maximize the window in the workspace - which is almost identical, but not quite, to the literal screen.
Really? That's not what it does for me. Right at this very moment I have a full screen app running on my MacBook Pro screen and a desktop on my monitor. Do you have "Displays have separate Spaces" turned off in Mission Control preferences?
I rather disbelieve in the idea that these things have "correct" semantics; only "what I am used to". At this point, I'm very used to the way macOS works and I find it considerably more pleasant than other windowing environments. Being able to full screen an app and then multi-swipe left or right between spaces or up for App Exposé is natural to me.
I've no doubt I could unlearn this and learn something else though.
I routinely have mail.app or Firefox fullscreen in one, with emacs or another browser window fullscreen in the other.
That's really not true at all, even for that exact thing. macOS still has very small clickable areas for resizing a window. Unless an app has focus, you don't even get the little two-sided arrows. And apps that are in dark mode basically all blend together because macOS either has no borders or like 1 pixel wide since macOS relies on shadows delineating windows, which only works for windows that are primarily light colors.
But seriously - just make that configurable! Then everybody can be happy with their own settings. But no.... the new hotness is no usability for anybody.
The “stoplight buttons” on windows are part of a very opinionated solution to window management that works from some people but is a complete mess if you don’t like full-screen apps. I would prefer if we had the option to convert the full-screen button to a maximize window button. Double-clicking on the window header is close.
The other thing that Windows users complain about it that closing a window doesn’t close the app. That one is just a confusion because they are used to how Windows windows. The Mac OS convention of keeping the app active is not wrong, it’s just a different approach and the kind of conceptual change that users need to make when they switch OSs.
Ctrl + Opt + Return is the only reason I have Rectangle installed.
Two recent ones I can think of:
Issue 1 is: Shift+click selection doesn't work in Finder's Icon view.
To reproduce: In finder select the "icons" view. Click on the first item, Hold shift, and while holding shit then click on the tenth item.
Expected behavior is to select Items 1-10 including ten.
Workaround: Switch to list view.
Issue 2: Lock screen keyboard shortcut doesn't work when mission control is activated.
To reproduce: Open mission control via app or hot corner. Press Control+Command+Q to lock screen. Screen won't lock.
Workaround: Deactivate mission control view before locking screen.
Yea...it's dumb. But in the words of the late great Steve Jobs, 'don't hold it that way'. I get that apple is different. But sometimes it just seems counterintuitive.
I don't think that's a bug. The icon view does not have an inherent ordering, since you can just drag icons around. What is supposed to be the range to select if you have an unordered view.
Issue 2: Lock screen keyboard shortcut doesn't work when mission control is activated.
That looks like a bug. Interestingly, it does work on the new external Apple keyboards when you press the key that also has Touch ID.
There must be something special about the overview screen that is stopping all default behaviour when in this mode, the cursor keys don’t work here either.
I found the article to be a little odd… awing at 3rd party apps basically replicating baked in features.
Although to be fair I am super meticulous in going through the accessibility and gesture features to get the UI feel just right for my tastes. MacOS, to me, feels like a clunker out of the box.
If you ‘need’ a tiling window manager, MacOS is not for you, Apple is never going to add one and is only going to cripple attempts by third parties to do so.
You’re holding it wrong.
It's been a few years since I've used OSX, but every version I've ever tried has this intentional bug. I say intentional because when I first got a mac in the 10.4 days I noticed that 'cut' was greyed out in the menu so I thoughtfully filed a bug report. To their credit they did answer the bug report several years later but they explained that they would not fix this as it is desired behaviour.
Baffling.
The benefit is that you don't have to decide whether you want to just "copy" or "cut" before you're ready to "paste", which makes a lot of sense if you're not coming from a Windows background. But yes, migrating from Windows to macOS makes this feel confusing.
If you want to copy a file in OSX with your mouse you use the menu bar whereas if you want to cut and paste (move) a file in OSX with your mouse then you use the two open windows method that you describe.
They are both very different and one isn't so discoverable.
What's the worst about this is that it's purely a choice and Apple intentionally greys out the cut option in the menu bar.
Madness.
In addition the UX research on direct manipulation vs select-and-operate seems to have shown that the mac made the right call, but the only work I've read in that area was done long ago.
This BTW is why shift-select doesn't work in icon mode (as a different commenter posted) because it was confusing for some people in a way that just drawing a selection for icons is not.
Its not consistent whatsoever.