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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

The only Apple device I use is the laptop I was given for work, and I've always disliked that the button that would "maximize" the window on other OS instead makes the window "fullscreen" (getting rid of the menu and everything else that entails). I recently discovered that I am actually able to "maximize" by double-clicking the top bar of the window, but I have no idea if this is something that works by default or if one of the various utilities I installed added this functionality. Either way, it seems basically impossible to discover other than by chance; if I hadn't double clicked that area by accident, I still wouldn't know.

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Default behavior of the green button click is full-screen, but option-click maximizes.

The behavior of double-clicking the title bar is controlled by the "Dock & Menu Bar" settings pane. It can be configured to minimize the window instead. You can also double-click any edge or corner to maximize from that side alone. Option-double-clicking will grow both sides. I like to option-double-click my Terminal windows to maximize their height without changing their width.

You can discover so many things on Mac by Option-clicking! It’s used in many places to give an ‘alternate’ function to buttons and the like.

Indeed, I think it’s a relic from the one button mouse.

not really, that’s control-clicking. They’d need four buttons to cover the permutations (before you even get to command and shift clicking)

Try the volume and wifi icons!

I just audibly gasped after clicking.

Apparently, this was an existing feature on older macOs-es. I used it a lot, but it has been removed as a default setting like ~8 years ago. But luckily you can still add this shortcut to macOs, this is the first thing I do when I get a fresh install:

1. Go to System Settings -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> App Shortcuts 2. Click the small (+) button under the shortcuts table. 3. Choose/Type the following values in the modal: - Application: All Applications - Menu Title: Zoom - Keyboard shortcut: Command + Shift + M (My preferred shortcut) 4. Click Save. 5. Voila, now you are able to maximize any window, and pressing it again it goes back to its original size. A cool trick is that now if you hover the green (+) button on the top of any page you will be able to access that shortcut from there as well. It sits just under the "Enter Full Screen" menu option.

Sorry for the bad formatting, apparently I cannot edit my comment on HN anymore.

  1. Go to System Settings -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> App Shortcuts
  2. Click the small (+) button under the shortcuts table
  3. Choose/Type the following values in the modal:
    - Application: All Applications
    - Menu Title: Zoom
    - Keyboard shortcut: Command + Shift + M (My preferred shortcut)
  4. Click Save.
  5. Voila, now you are able to maximize any window, and pressing it again it goes back to its original size. A cool trick is that now if you hover the green (+) button on the top of any page you will be able to access that shortcut from there as well. It sits just under the "Enter Full Screen" menu option.

Makes me wish macosxhints was still around. This was precisely what that site was about. I wonder whether there’s a modern day, fastish way to learn all this hidden behavior.

Chat GPT4 gave a good explanation including the option key behavior when I gave the prompt below. GPT3.5 wasn't nearly as helpful though.

> Can I maximize or "snap" windows on modern MacOS without entering full screen mode (with its annoying multiple "spaces")?

I’ve used this feature on windows 3.11 (I think? It’s been a long time ago…) macOS window management is very lacking but without this I’d just give up, right now I’m barely getting by - installed rectangle recently which gives keyboard shortcuts to window snapping.

If you move the mouse up to the top of the screen in fullscreen mode the menu bar will reappear, so things work about like normal (although that certainly wasn't obvious the first time I pressed the green button). The double-click on the title bar is "Zoom" mode, which you can activate with Window >> Zoom. But I agree, it's not obvious, nor is it obvious what "Zoom" means.

> what "Zoom" means

This:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36373756

> not wasting space with useless empty space inside the window

Wow. In the linked comment you just turned it into the class discussions.apple.com answer which always translates to “you are doing it wrong” and then “why do you even need that”.

Apologies if it came out that way, I was merely trying to describe what was the original design of it, irrespective of whether it fits one's expectations.

Unfortunately my main use of the menu bar is to have information at a glance (like the date and time), so having to move my mouse to see it kind of defeats the purpose. I definitely would not have guessed what "Zoom" mode meant though!

This is a bit annoying when an app has its own menu near the top of the screen. The only app I use in full screen is a media player. Every time I try to interact with the in-app hamburger menu, the whole wind shifts and the system window bay animates out.

I really don’t like the full screen behaviour in macOS.

IntelliJ also has a menu bar just below the top of the full screen. I wish Apple made the collapsing top menus require much more insistence before appearing.

Apple would say they don’t like hamburger menus. If the app is designed contrary to the guidelines (which say avoid hamburger menus) and tries to fight the system, unsurprisingly it’s not going to work well with the system.

Wasn't (isn't) double clicking the title bar the maximize behavior for Windows and Gnome too?

Holding option and clicking the plus will maximize it like a Window's maximize button.

The option key on macOS enables all sorts of extra functionality, open some drop down menus while holding it and you'll find extra / more advanced options in some. Or if you option click your Wifi, for instance, you get all the network info for the network in a bigger popup than clicking it alone!

I find it baffling that the “option” key is not labeled “option” or simply “opt”. WTF Apple?

Indeed it wasn’t for the longest time, but it has been for the last few years (I think with the generation of keyboards after the bad “butterfly” hinges). But the symbol on the key always matched with where it was mentioned on screen, in menus and such.

Once I got used to gestures, I actually like macOS window management more than Linux/Windows for single monitor. It seems a bit clunky if you have multiple monitors

Cmd Left/Right to change between fullscreen windows. Cmd Up Arrow to show all of the fullscreen windows. Using the trackpad, 3 finger swipe up to show all the windows. Either 3 finger or 2 finger swipe left/right to switch between them.

When 2 windows are fullscreen, you can use Cmd Up Arrow to show all of them and drag 1 window in the bar at the top onto another window icon in the bar at the top to do a vertical split (only works for 2 windows)

Is there a way to make Cmd+Tab work with fullscreen windows? If I can't remember if I've made an app fullscreen, I have to three-finger swipe up to see the list of maximized applications and if it's not there, start Cmd-Tabbing to find it. Because I don't use macOS exclusively, what often happens is I try to Cmd+Tab, can't find the window, assume I'm not actually running the software I think I am and then eventually discover it's fullscreen somewhere. I'd really love to find a way to be able to Cmd+Tab through all windows, fullscreen or otherwise.

I'm not sure but I think if you try to relaunch (through the dock or Cmd+space search) it and it's already open, it'll jump to the open window

Try the utility called Alt-Tab: https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app

Thanks. This ultimately did what I was looking for.

By requiring full screen windows that method is a non-started for those of us who don’t use Apple’s full screen. I find that it isolates app from each other too much. I’m almost always working with multiple apps at once.

Option-clicking the green maximize button is the shortcut I usually tell people about. If you hold down option, you'll notice that the mouseover for the green ball changes to a plus instead of the fullscreen icon.

The double-click on the title bar is customizable; I set it to minimize the window to the Dock.

To maximize the window (w/o going full screen, which I hate too), I’d alt-click the green button (would because I never maximize windows either; I’m passionately anti-snapping, anti-fullscreen, etc.).

The title bar double-click is configurable. I think minimize is a more useful, but maximize is the default.

You can also double click on any edge of a window to expand that edge to the edge of the display.

> I recently discovered that I am actually able to "maximize" by double-clicking the top bar

Long time Mac Os user, never knew that, thanks

The setting for that is in Desktop & Dock. It used to default to Minimize.

Works by default

Yes, but it's not very consistent. For example, Safari will not maximize if you double click the title bar. It'll just maximize vertically.

"Maximize" on MacOS means "go to the largest useful size", not "fill the screen". It's application and context dependent. ("Fill the screen" is a separate mode which the top comment is complaining about, justifiably IMO.)

That's because it's not Maximize, it's Zoom, which uses content hints to resize the window while not wasting space with useless empty space inside the window, thus still allowing one to see other windows. When there's no content size hint it falls back to what Windows and Linux call Maximize, which is more like a windowed fullscreen mode.

This probably reflects my not 'coming from' macOS or idiomatic ways of working in it, but I basically never hit 'maximize' on a window because I want to see more of whatever happens to be in the window. I hit 'maximize' because I want to use an app's internal features (tabs, split panes) to manage multiple app-specific contents/views instead of external window management.

I'm never like

> Ah, just let me resize my browser window so that this image will fit within it!

I understand that. IMHO macOS should have both Maximize and Zoom as they do different things and serve different use cases (Apple seems to think that if you want Maximize you actually want fullscreen, which kind of makes sense in a way, except not, e.g when one wants to still be desktopish and rely on cmd tab or cmd backtick, and because the fullscreen/tiling/spaces is crappily implemented for power users)

Now, in practice, Zoom is really nice when it works (I'm using it all the time with Finder+ windows), the problem is that it takes a single app not providing the content size hint for it to break and make it confusing. And then a vicious circle starts where more apps don't care about what it's supposed to do, and before you know it Zoom is mostly falling back to being Maximize most of the time, and people wonder why when it's doing the original Zoom thing it behaves differently and think it's weird and broken (which is perfectly understandable)

In a way Apple either did not embrace the winlin paradigm enough (e.g having a proper Maximize alongside Zoom + having an option for per window cmd tab) or they did not stick to their guns enough (enforcing Zoom to be correct + having a worthy fullscreen/tiling implementation) and we're left with a shitty compromise.

+ A very similar case that ties into this is how the Finder went from being fully spatial to a half-spatial half-global compromise.

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