I find hilarious the fact that we need to buy & install a windowing tool because the native OS window system has been broken for the past 40 years.
Can't they just copy what windows and linux are doing?
Can't they just copy what windows and linux are doing?
But whenever I've asked people at Apple about this, the response has been "Well, Apple is historically just very opinionated about window placement and settings." The overall vibe was "Apple knows best."
The way macOS does window management is internally consistent, and for those of us who have used it for decades, it works perfectly well. Just because Windows chose to do it a different way, and Linux copied Windows because it had a monopoly on the desktop, doesn't mean what macOS is doing is bad.
If you don't like it, you don't have to use macOS. (Or, you can install the exact utilities various people are mentioning to force macOS to act like Windows.)
Some things on macOS are just different, like having the red/green/yellow button on the left instead of on the right on Windows. Neither is objectively good or bad, just different.
But that I cannot take a window, drag and drop it to the side to make it take half the screen size is bad. It's an obvious feature nowadays and macOS should handle it natively. They don't even have to remove the way they do it currently, because it has its use (I have a permanently open full screen/split screen with my email client and Slack, it's great for that), just add a new mechanism that works better for quick split screen.
Same with command+tab, it sucks that it doesn't work with open windows (eg if I have 2 open Firefox windows, only 1 will be displayed). It used to work like that so I'm ok with macOS keeping it as a default, but WHY don't they add a setting to do what people expect? Or why don't they add option+tab as a shortcut with this behaviour?
I've used macOS, Windows, and various Linux DEs (KDE, XFCE, Gnome) extensively in my life and all of them have good and bad concepts. This is not a blind spot issue, just that some UI concepts work better than other, and the correct thing to do is to adapt.
Personally I use this (or even resize or rearrange windows) very rarely though. Most of the time if I need two documents side by side it’s in an IDE that supports panes.
As for command-tab, it’s deeper than just one command. The macOS windowing model is just fundamentally different with how windows are not equal to processes. A toggle would need to change the windowing model of the OS to work properly.
I put two windows next to each other all the time. It's perfectly discoverable. I just drag one window on the right....
...then I drag the other window on the left.
Boom. Done. No fancy features required.
See, you're coming from a basic assumption that you will do most of your work with windows full-screened. That's not how classic macOS worked, that's not how Mac OS X worked for many years, and that's not how many of us have our workflows. That's how Windows worked back in the '90s, and the paradigm remained even though screens have gotten much, much bigger since then.
What you're demanding is that all OSes "adapt" to become a UI monoculture. So that the only way any of us can do things is the way you think is "objectively better", even though the evidence you have for that is "well, Windows does it this way, and Linux copied them, and I'm so used to it I can't imagine doing things any other way, so it must be best!"
but i actually use a tiling WM the way OSX intended the user to its own desktp, with a bunch of virtual desktop and full screen app
- Apple, probably
I've always been kind of an Apple fanboy, but I've been recently finding myself in this novel situation where I'm dreaming of a System76 laptop so I can just run PopOS. When I first started using macOS 15 years ago I was all about the slick UI animations. Now I just want an unobtrusive OS that's fast. Heck, I've been even flirting with the idea of not even having a desktop environment at all. A window manager should be enough. Maybe I'm just getting old?
Another option for this is Hammerspoon, e.g.: https://github.com/scottwhudson/Lunette
Moom, which is the tool I prefer, similarly shows a popover when hovering over the green button.
Personally I prefer this sort of approach and wish it could be replicated on other OSes. The Aero Snap way of doing things with the noisy “should I snap here” animations are annoying and too easy to accidentally trigger.
I want different virtual desktops to behave like they are different computers with a shared clipboard, i.e., I don't want to see apps from other virtual desktops showing up on 'Alt-Tab', dock bar to show all open apps, etc.
It is amazing feature-wise, but it has some annoying bugs and it seems abandonware (last update Aug 2022).
https://alfred.app/workflows/alfredapp/window-switcher/
Workflows for browser tabs aren't as up-to-date though: