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Comment by Izkata | Hacker News Reader

IIRC in that era, the leftmost part of the title bar could be clicked to get a menu of options that contained Minimize, Maximize, Move, Resize, Close, and maybe one or two others. If you chose Move or Resize, the mouse would change cursors and just moving the mouse would change the window, then you'd click to get out of it.

I'm pretty sure this had a button there in like Windows 3.11 or 98, that I think was later hidden so you'd just click the title bar to get it?

Edit: https://www.functionx.com/windows/Lesson06.htm

You'd click the application icon in the title bar, then in WinXP you could reach it by right-clicking anywhere in the title bar.

And in the Windows 3 era, it was an actual button (IIRC the minus on the left wasn't minimize, it was this menu, and the down arrow on the right was minimize): https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/w/win3x.htm

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In modern Windows 10, you still get that in well-designed applications. In poorly-designed applications (hate to throw shade at Firefox, but it is one), you may be able to still get that menu by hitting ALT+SPACE. It just pops out of nowhere because there's nowhere to click to get to it.

ALT+SPACE, M, arrow keys is forever in my brain due to so many poorly behaved programs which would open their window somewhere off-screen, and that was the way to move them back onto the screen.

> ALT+SPACE, M, arrow keys is forever in my brain due to so many poorly behaved programs which would open their window somewhere off-screen, and that was the way to move them back onto the screen.

Happens quite often with dialog boxes that pop up to inform you of some error. Particulalrly if you're working on multiple screens and have moved the application off your main one. (Which is what at least I tend to do when working on a laptop attached to one or more external screen/s.)

You brought back a muscle memory I forgot I had: ALT+Space would activate the Control Menu [1] and then pressed down twice and enter to resize the window using the keyboard arrow keys.

[1] http://the_messenger3.tripod.com/refwine1.html#ControlMenu Behold Ye Olde Intrrnet haha

I think you can use ALT + F6 to start resizing (On GNOME at least)

> IIRC in that era, the leftmost part of the title bar could be clicked to get a menu of options that contained Minimize, Maximize, Move, Resize ... I'm pretty sure this had a button there in like Windows 3.11 or 98, that I think was later hidden so you'd just click the title bar to get it?

Still there, even in Windows10. (And AFAICR even W11; only used that a couple months last year.) It's called the System Menu, IIRC. If you see nothing to click, try pressing [Alt]-[Space] -- even MS Office apps, which have gotten rid of the icon, still pop up the menu.

> And in the Windows 3 era, it was an actual button (IIRC the minus on the left wasn't minimize, it was this menu,

I also called it "the big fat hyphen" when I first started using Windows 3, but AIUI now, that was actually supposed to be a picture of the space bar. As in, you know, [Alt]-[Space].

> I also called it "the big fat hyphen" when I first started using Windows 3, but AIUI now, that was actually supposed to be a picture of the space bar. As in, you know, [Alt]-[Space].

A pic of the old Windows 3.x Program Manager with its Program Groups within the Multiple Document Interface, linked somewhere in this thread, reminded me: Sub-windows within an MDI had a shorter bar for an icon, and IIRC you got the system menu (document menu?) for the focused one by pressing [Alt]-[hyphen] (or [Alt]-[minus]).

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