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Comment by p1necone | Hacker News Reader

I much prefer what a lot of Linux desktop environments support, which is holding down alt and clicking anywhere on a window to move it. With that + a keyboard shortcut for closing a window you can get rid of title bars on apps entirely if you want. Sadly Windows doesn't support it natively, although there's another comment on this thread talking about ways to make it work.

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I love this feature and it's since become indispensable to me. I find it pretty funny that my #1 favorite desktop UI feature is from Linux. One of the first things I'll put on a fresh install of Windows or MacOS is a utility that re-creates this behavior.

I use AltDrag on Windows (requires a quick tweak for HiDPI): https://stefansundin.github.io/altdrag/

And Easy Move + Resize on MacOS: https://github.com/dmarcotte/easy-move-resize

I'm hoping that Microsoft just implements it natively eventually - their window snapping/tiling-lite functionality has been steadily getting better so they clearly have people working on this kind of window UX QOL stuff.

There's a Microsoft utility calls powertoys that makes the window snapping/tiling even better with it's Fancy Zones feature. Also has a color picker which someone in this thread was decrying the lack of on windows.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/

> window snapping/tiling

Put me in the camp that hates window snap/tiling.

I have a certain workflow that needs this window there, and this one here ... don't snap to a location or go full screen.

Check out FancyZones in Microsoft PowerToys.

>AltDrag

That's awesome, I remember when I was a CS student in college I also fell in love with the alt+drag of windows on Linux and I wanted to bring the same on my Windows PC so I wrote this extremely hacky and very unstable tool: https://github.com/Morgawr/EmptyWM

It was one of my first "open source" projects and a great learning experience, I would never recommend anyone to use it because it was full of bugs (also I haven't touched it in like 10+ years) but I used it every day and it was such a great feeling just being able to improve my own life with tools I created myself. :)

This behavior is natively supported on macOS, although it is turned off by default. Click and drag anywhere on a window while holding CTRL+CMD

> defaults write -g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture -bool true

> reboot

On the flip side, I have become so used to AltDrag behavior on windows, that now I consider KDE alt-drag subpar because it lacks the right-button drag to resize.

These little tidbits are the reason I love Hacker News. Thank you for sharing!

In Firefox holding down alt lets you select text in links without navigating to the link target. How do you do that without moving the window?

I didn't know you could do that. I always start dragging from outside the link. Moving windows is a better use of the key for me.

For this very reason (alt-click in applications), I have the window move modifier set to Meta instead of Alt.

Me too. Don't forget about right-click + key to resize the window. I have to use a mac for work and so use Easy Move+Resize to get this same functionality.

alt + right click to resize! how did I never discover this one, thanks

Wow, TIL.

This is such a great little nugget. Thanks.

Desktop windows should be able to have tabs sticking out of them (independent of whatever window title bar they may or may not have, but possibly showing the title or document name or message), along ANY edge, that you can drag around to the desired edge and position, that help you arrange the windows in piles and rows and columns.

Restricting tabs to the top edge of the window is stupid, because text is much wider than it is tall, so you can fit a lot more labeled tabs in a vertical column along the left or right edge of the window, than in a horizontal row along the top or bottom edge of the window. The tabs you get along the top edge of Chrome are useless when you have a lot of tabs opened, because all you can see are the icons, and none of the labels are visible.

That way the tabs are all visible even when the window isn't, and they afford a very easy way to see all the window titles at once, bring the window to the front, drag it around, and pop up pie menus to do things like push it to the back or front (down/up gestures), iconify it, make it full screen, and other window management commands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)

Example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy...

>HyperTIES browser and Gosling Emacs authoring tool with pie menus on the NeWS window system (1988)

>HyperTIES is an early hypermedia browser developed under the direction of Dr. Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab. This screen snapshot shows the HyperTIES authoring tool (built with UniPress's Gosling Emacs text editor, written in MockLisp) and browser (built with the NeWS window system, written in PostScript, C and Forth). The tabbed windows and pie menu reusable components were developed by Don Hopkins, who also developed the NeWS Emacs (NeMACS) and HyperTIES user interfaces. (Sorry about the quality -- this is a scan of an old screen dump printed by a laser printer.)

Tabbed windows in combination with pie menus are the ingredients for a great window manager.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4

>NeWS Tab Window Demo (1990)

Demo of the Pie Menu Tab Window Manager for The NeWS Toolkit 2.0. Developed and demonstrated by Don Hopkins.

Ok as a compromise perhaps developers can show custom content in the title bar for a few seconds after startup. That way, the developer can show that they have mastered control of that area, while the user can still drag the window. Win-win.

Windows has pretty decent keyboard shortcuts for manipulating windows‘ positions, though. Clicking and manual window manipulation should very rarely be necessary, shouldn’t it?

Resizing a window with the keyboard shortcuts, especially on a high resolution monitor is time consuming.

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