I never thought I’d see the day macOS would get tiling window management. Wonder how it will interact with Stage Manager if at all.
Are there situations that make more sense to use a tiling manager like on larger (where all the tiles are usable) or smaller screens (where full expansion makes sense)?
1. focus follows mouse, the window you are pointing at gets the focus. This feels very strange at first. but pulls a surprising amount of friction out of working with multiple apps. However you have to pair this with.
2. don't raise on focus. this let you work on a lower window. to raise you click on a specific part of the window, usually the title bar. if you don't have this focus follows mouse is terrible. this lets you have the main window(usually the documentation or reference) open on top while you type away on the lower window.
3. At this point I heard of i3 and it made perfect sense to me. I have never said "boy I sure am glad this window is half covered up" I ether want one app full screen, two apps side by side(reference and work) or many small apps(terminals). why not just have the window manager enforce this instead of me fiddling with windows. these days I use mainly use spectrwm because it fills that perfect middle ground between too sparse(dwm) and too featured(i3).
That said, for my day to day operations(I sys-admin, so lots of terminals) it works great. however there are many apps that do not play well. for example, I recently set up a linux box for steam games and steam was not happy with i3(all menus were separate windows) this is probably fixable but I just went with a normal wm. And when I do actual work on it I am reminded why I like tiling wm's as I find myself shuffling windows all the time.
Closing thoughts, an example of a tiling wm internal to an app is blender, even before I started using tiling wm's I thought blender had a very good ui for getting work done, much better than the mdi type apps that were common at the time. so just imagine your whole desktop working that way. And tabs, really tabbed interfaces should be a function of your window manager not the app, but that ship has sailed and I don't think there is any way to fix it now.
An overlapped/stacked interface is fine a lot of the time, but the flexibility is important.
What really drives me crazy is the 100% tiled-interface. I feel like something important is just below the tiles, but I can't see it.
So when Joe Windows considers switching over to Mac, they see that there's no equivalent to the Windows snapping feature that's been in their OS since Windows 7, and they might think macOS is inferior.
I personally don't need this feature from Apple but I think they needed to add it for their own business needs.
I have this set to 15px, so when I drag my app windows around, they snap to a grid with 15px spaces between the windows. Dunno why I find it so satisfying, but it really scratches an itch in my brain.
I get a bunch of ui issues doing full screen, and though I use Magnet for snapping, I want something that stays snapped. Looks like this will do it.
I have a 49" ultrawide so it's super useful to have precise control over where a window goes. I also use 3 desktops (as Apple calls them) and have different windows sizes depending on what I'm doing. Having overlapping windows would just be super annoying now!
Fiddling with the mouse to resize windows manually or having windows overlapping and covering up information on each other is not really a great way to interface with them. Maybe it's helpful to locate the windows and bring them into focus, but once they're in focus and in use, I want to be maximizing their screen real estate and making sure they're 100% readable.
And, really, it's something the OS should have had at the very least as an optional feature for over a decade now. Windows introduced this feature in Windows 7. It's been a sore spot of a missing feature and it's especially detracting for the Windows users that Apple wants to have switch over to the Mac platform.
Compared to peek and switch it provides more usable space since windows can be maximized without leaving space for another window to peek out, less manual arrangement since Windows need not be carefully arranged. Also I normally switch because I want to do another task or in resource to a notification.
That said however we choose to analyze it it's in part subjective matter of taste. There is no singular correct answer.
Now so just need a clipboard history manager, a way to make cmd+tab behave like Windows alt+tab, a way to mute the mic in the status bar, and a different setting for the trackpad/mouse wheel direction, and I won’t need to install random apps for basic features anymore.
I believe the new control center API is intended to push seldom used icons into the control center
> searching through open windows by typing
The new Siri is context aware once the developers include their data through new APIs. The Microsoft version which was snooping through private browsing, secure apps, and logging passwords in open databases was not the right way to go.
More than just cleaning the menu bar (I don't care about that), I want a guarantee that I can see and click on every menu bar icon somewhere. Whether that's the present vision or not, this sounds like a clear step in the right direction!
While I have lots of gripes about macOS and I understand that probably some of them are things Apple will just never go for, it does almost seem like Apple is giving some neglected desktop fundamentals much needed improvements. Fixing linear mouse movement on the last major release was nice, as is the new window snapping thing.
> > searching through open windows by typing
> The new Siri is context aware once the developers include their data through new APIs. The Microsoft version which was snooping through private browsing, secure apps, and logging passwords in open databases was not the right way to go.
I don't want any kind of internet-connected AI assistant on the desktop at all. I just want the ability to task switch efficiently by fuzzy filtering on basic stuff like window titles and descriptions like can be done easily with Plasma and GNOME built-ins. (On Windows, PowerToys can do it but I don't love that interface and even though it's an MS thing I don't quite think it counts as built-in, either.) I guess many people do rely on proprietary screenreaders but that seems unfortunate tbf.
Filtering windows based on their contents could maybe be a little bit cool but I think it'd probably mostly get in the way, even if there were an app I trusted doing the searching with appropriately limited APIs. I wouldn't readily trust a proprietary, internet-connected service to do that kind of searching, though— neither from Apple nor from Microsoft. If such a feature required me to enable Siri I wouldn't even be interested in trying it.
But your comment inspired me to Google anew and... I guess it was always intended to only kind of disable sleep?
Cmd+Tab: AltTab (https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/)
Different setting for the trackpad/mouse wheel: Mac Mouse Fix (https://macmousefix.com) or LinearMouse (https://linearmouse.app/) or Mos (https://mos.caldis.me/)
I really hope there is a "automatic tiling" option, otherwise this is just mouse support for the current "Move Window"/"Tile Window" options already available on the OS (and easily bindable via custom shortcuts).
There are floating window managers with window snapping on the free Unices, of course. But none of those claims to be a tiling window manager and nobody confuses them with such.
https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/pointer-...
A 3840x2160 monitor run at 1x means a framebuffer of 3840x2160.
At 2x, the effective resolution is 1920x1080, and this also uses a framebuffer of 3840x2160.
At 1.5x, the effective resolution is 2560x1440. This is implemented by rendering at 4x (5160x2880) and then downscaling that.
At 1.25x, the effective resolution is 3072x1728. This is also implemented by rendering at 4x (6144x3456) and downscaling that.
The difference between all of these is quite noticeable.
Edit: Apparently Apple has been shipping its laptops with non-integer scaling for a while, which is interesting.
The laptop displays work by scaling down 2x/3x too.
But even disregarding all that - if such scaling can be done without problems with webpages, then clearly there's no technical impediment to doing the same elsewhere. It's not like HTML is magic.
It took them a decade to release a "Send Later" feature? How's that for innovation? Snobs!
Stage Manager was the most interesting and useful thing to happen to window management in over a decade, and I was really hoping we'd see Apple do more with it. Its dynamic nature (windows don't always live in just a single context!) solved a lot of problems inherent in Spaces, and yet there's still plenty of room to build on its foundation.
I was hoping we'd at least see the window snapping behavior ported over from iPadOS. It's a really well-thought-out way to simplify window resizing and overlapping, and it would go a long way on MacOS (perhaps with a toggle in Control Center for those edge cases where you actually want pixel precision). Maybe in MacOS 16...
… really? I’ve tried to use it a few times but it’s just… not good. Not very intuitive, full of idiosyncrasies, and it doesn’t solve the basic "I want to snap 2 windows side by side" problem. Maybe it’s more interesting on iPad?
I’m glad they finally bring window snapping to Mac.
I tried it with my studio display for a day and it was like wrestling a raccoon all fucking day.
I've personally been infuriated by the absence of Send Later feature. I can't fathom that I could do it with a "stupid/inferior" Windows Phone that wasn't obscenely priced like an iPhone.
They lost their technological leadership since Steve Jobs. End of Story.
BTW I'm an iPhone13 owner and I still stand for what I said.
I bet I'm gonna keep Rectangle as well.
Ever since I've been using a Mac since Nov. 2023 that's been one of the things that I've battled with, and I've assigned a heck tons of shortcuts to make that happen.
On macOS, the moment I fullscreen an app, it's taken out of that flow. So for so many years, I've had my terminal full screen on workspace 2. Meta+2 it in my muscle memory for "go to terminal".