Comment by barryvan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by barryvan | Hacker News Reader

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What a great little utility -- part of my growing collection of tools to make MacOS behave more reasonably, or at least more in line with my particular expectations (which, yes, in many cases means more like Windows).

I think that part of the appeal of an app like this is about keeping things "tidy". MacOS seems to be built around making it easy to clutter -- lots of randomly sized overlapping windows (resolved using Rectangle for Aero-snap like functionality -- the weird full-screen split-screen nonsense in MacOS is just frustratingly limited and slow and has too many animations and transitions to be useful), dozens of apps filling up the dock, six hundred icons in the menu bar (which I use vanilla.app to resolve), and so on.

I think my mental model distinguishes between applications and utilities. Utilities are effectively like the old TSR tools -- you start them, then they just run quietly in the background until you need them, with no interface. Applications, by contrast, _are_ their interface, so it feels strange that when I close that interface, the application itself isn't closed. This utility alters the behaviour of the OS so that it conforms to this mental model. I suspect that this is a situation where there's no "right" approach, but rather a set of preferences and learned behaviours.

On Mac I usually just double click somewhere in the title bar on a window to make it automatically size to fill up the whole screen, seems to work like a charm every time. Note, I’m not talking about the full screen mode which is something different.

I do use that, but I find that it's inconsistent. From what I can tell, it seems to toggle between the current size and the previous size -- which becomes problematic when using an external screen. Or perhaps that's just Finder -- it's hard to tell! Frustratingly, this matches the behaviour of alt-clicking (sorry, option-clicking) on the maximise button, and I really love being able to have two windows comfortably share a screen with no wasted space, aero-snap style.

I think you are right, it is the finder app that behaves a little differently, which I’ve always assumed is because you typically need to drag files in and out of the finder so it leaves a gap to make that easy, but you can still make it full screen if you want. I’ve never noticed this with any other apps.

Safari does it too (on a big screen).

Zooming a window on MacOS is supposed to grow the window to the largest useful size, as defined by the app, which is not necessarily the full screen.

In contrast, many of the behaviors are better on the Mac, but they do take some getting used to. The reason Apple doesn’t ‘just add a preference’ is that that would prevent people from getting over that little hurdle of getting used to it.

Just like cleaning up the recently used app list on the phone all the time, quitting all applications like this is a step backwards.

I'm not so sure that the behaviours on one system are necessarily "better". I know that my preferences lie in one direction (away from MacOS), and I infer that yours lie in another. If a computer is a tool to get some set of things done, and these can be achieved with equivalent ease in systems which align to your preferences compared to the those which align with mine, then those preferences must be subjective.

Phones have a different pedigree -- I'm not upset if an app that's "open" is unloaded after some time or due to system pressure, even if I lose state on my phone, possibly because that's how things have always been (for a given value of "always"), and possibly also because phones don't have a dock or task bar to track "running" apps. On a computer, if the app windows being closed means the app is (mostly) unloaded and I will need to restore state with a new window, why not close it entirely? What does having it sitting in the dock with a dot consuming (admittedly few) resources give me beyond just pinning a shortcut?

You are prepared to fight the system, while you don’t know why it is doing what it is doing and what you are gaining by fighting.

Your arguments are mostly ‘I’m used to Windows doing X so that’s what I want on the Mac.’ If you want Windows, use Windows, that’s a lot easier than trying to get Mac OS to be Windows. It’s not Windows, if you can get used to what it is you’ll have a great time and if not you’ll end up frustrating yourself.

This smacks of the typical Apple, "you're holding it wrong" condescension. I understand why MacOS does things the way it does most of the time. That doesn't mean that I can't still find it frustrating.

Yes, unironically. The computer should adapt to me, not vice versa. It exists entirely to do things I tell it to do.

If you want a computer that does exactly what you want the way you think you want it, clearly you should not get a Mac.

An application’s windows aren’t the extent of their interface though.

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