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Comment by atribecalledqst | Hacker News Reader

FYI -- on my MBP I use a program called Spectacle to snap windows around, and I now have no complaints relative to what you can do on Windows.

Development on Spectacle ceased[1] and it looks like the community may have rallied around an open-source program called Rectangle, which is open source. At least, judging from this single Reddit thread lol:

https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/kazpcn/spectacle_alter...

[1] Although when I search for it now, I see an update from 2023 on softonic? Although the original dev's github repo for it hasn't been updated in years. https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle

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I use Rectangle and still have complaints about Mac window management. Rectangle itself is great, but it's discernably a patch over a bad window management paradigm, and the awkwardness underneath pretty regularly shows through.

As just one example—the dock is atrocious for a browser-centric workflow. I only ever have 2 "apps" open at a time, but I have 6 Firefox windows and 2 IDE windows, and remembering where I put a specific window (or even that I already have it open!) is a chronic problem. I know about right-click to show all, but the text that pops up is small (it's a context menu, not a first-class navigation element) and that doesn't help with the discoverability problem.

I'm sure that there are other apps to patch the other aspects of the system that irritate me, but if you have to install 4 third party tools to get something close to how good Windows is out of the box then I'd say OP has a good point.

I think this must be a matter of preference. I absolutely hate Windows’ window management. I waste endless time fussing around getting windows where I want them to be.

This happens every time I unplug my laptop from external monitors, or plug it in to external monitors (even if they’re the exact same model and configuration as other monitors I’ve previously used). It’s aggravating and distracts me from what I’m trying to do.

Whereas I never have any issues on OSX, always find my windows where I expect them to be, and spend a lot less time moving and rearranging them.

The two operating systems do have different approaches to window management and to me it sounds like you simply prefer Windows, whereas I prefer OSX.

At work I have a Windows laptop that I plug into a dock with two additional monitors. Windows correctly returns windows to the screen it was previously using if I unplug and then plug the laptop back into the dock. Is that not the desired behaviour?

*bad window management for you Believe it or not, some people actually do like to have free moving windows and such.

Also you seem to be ignorant of a lot of features of macOS, like cmd-tab, focus an app, cmd-up arrow to show the windows of the app, and so forth. Or swipe down from the trackpad on a Dock icon to show the windows of the app.

Anyway, YMMV as always. Personally I find the window management atrocious not because of the way it was designed, which definitely works for me (and I hate the Windows’ one), but because of the bugs which they insist on never ever fixing…

> like cmd-tab, focus an app, cmd-up arrow to show the windows of the app, and so forth

It's not that I'm ignorant of these, it's that they're clunky for a browser centric workflow. The abstraction of an "app" is just plain wrong for the way that I and many others use computers these days, because one app (the browser) is home to most of the tasks I'm working on and already has its own second-level navigation in the form of tabs. The "app" layer means on Mac there are three levels of navigation to get to what I'm trying to do, which is too many.

What makes Windows (and most Linux DEs) better for the browser-centric world is that windows themselves are first class citizens—I don't have to pass through Firefox to get to GitHub.

Interesringly the default DE in MOST Linux distros is GNOME which does not do what you describe, instead it follows the MacOS approach of alt-tab going through apps and not windows. I agree it is frustrating though! Have recently moved back to Windows and their alt-tab going through windows was one of the things I liked. However Microsoft has sadly enhanced it to include groups of Windows if you have stacked them side by side. One step forward and one step backward. As is the norm for modern UX.

I use Rectangle for this purpose.

If you have it already, another alternative is to use BetterTouchTool and set it to override the behavior of the green corner button. For me it works just like Windows where there’s “minimize” on the yellow button and “maximize” on the green. I still use gestures like exposé but never have to worry about switching desktops or getting stuck in full screen.

+1 to BTT. I also love how they have a (fully disable-able) drag to split, similar to Windows' hot edges

I use Amethyst, but it's keyboard, not mouse driven, so a bit different.

On the opposite side, would you (or anybody) know of a program to show windows in a cascade/overview style, on windows? So for example have one or 2 “main” windows, and have some/all the other windows in a cascaded view in the background. I would think it would help productivity a lot.

(PowerToys doesn’t do this by itself, you have to select every window in place if I’m not mistaken.)

I use BetterSnapTool.

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