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Comment by schindlabua | Hacker News Reader

It's a slippery slope, once you've spent a year tailoring your setup it removes so much friction from those tasks you do 100 times a day. Sometimes I look at my macos coworkers and they have a single application on fullscreen and then they shake their mouse or whatever and 20 windows fly over the screen and then they scan them all to find the other window they are looking for, and I really wonder how they get work done.

I use i3 and have 5 credit-card sized terminals open at any given time without taking up much screen real estate, and it's so great.

Takes some getting used to though.

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> Sometimes I look at my macos coworkers ... and I really wonder how they get work done

And I read the sentence before and wonder the same:

> once you've spent a year tailoring your setup

The irony is not lost on me but you can get productive if you spend a weekend configuring stuff and then you upgrade as you go :)

In both cases during the "learn the tool" phase you end up spending time having to figure out how to do things, understand workflows etc.

In the TUI case though, you can usually tweak that workflow and configure it to match your brand of thinking. It costs a little more per instance up front, but after that year (or whatever time period), you get a much less frustrating experience, and the oddball things your particular workflow requires have been smoothed out - where in the GUI you'd still be frustrated and a bit fumbly or suboptimal, so you continue to pay the penalty for it over time.

It's really about how you amortize the total time put into using the tool.

>… macos coworkers and they have a single application on fullscreen…

They are probably recent ex-Windows users struggling to understand a superficially similar but profoundly different WIMP paradigm.

>… then they shake their mouse or whatever and 20 windows fly over the screen

The fact that they can’t handle Mission Control is another tell-tale

Mac OS itself confuses things by forcing apps to be full screen, rather than sizing to the content

> Mac OS itself confuses things by forcing apps to be full screen, rather than sizing to the content

I don't understand what you mean.

macOS has never forced apps to be full screen.

It doesn't force applications to be fullscreen, but it does have garbage tooling for managing multiple windows on the screen simultaneously. Even windows has better with hotkeys and gestures for snapping to parts of the screen.

Mac OS originally didn’t have the concept of full screen (expect for games, pro software) or tiling. Its floating, overlapping and spatially oriented windows blew people's minds. It was coherent and wonderfully executed, both powerful and simple, I miss it dearly.

During the OS X brain transplant and particularly after Lion it became a hybrid that’s neither here or there, unfortunately.

You can option click the green button, but I agree, one of the major regressions from Lion, IIRC, that we haven’t recovered from yet.

Sadly by the looks of some of the replies here, never will recover from, since people seem unaware that it never used to do that, and would delightfully size itself to the content. This is the #1 feature that I really loved about Mac OS window management.

I love the terminal and use vim as my primary text editor but I can't remember the last time Mac OS full-screened an app for me unless I told it to. I drive most of my mac through keyboard shortcuts and minimal pointer interaction. Perhaps a mouse-first Mac users are forced into full-screen? That still doesn't sound right though.

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