I’ve never ever liked working with the full screen mode. Very hard to do multi tasking with it. Curious to see how much people use it
Research shows that almost everyone performs worse when they multi task, even if they THINK they are doing things better / faster. It’s an illusion. The hilarious thing is everyone thinks it only affects other people. They’re a special snowflake or something haha.
But sometimes multi tasking is needed, like if you’re in a zoom meeting, referencing docs, slack messages, graphs, etc. In that case i’ll just have multiple windows on my desktop and resize them as needed. Or if it’s just for a few seconds, then i’ll jump between full screen windows.
But I set the menu bar and dock to auto-hide to create a less distracting, more focused workspace. Therefore, Corner Time is very important to me, as it allows me to check the time without repeatedly hovering over the menu bar.
Otherwise, the menu bar makes the contents not truly 16:9 or awkwardly shows distractions/leakage in the form of the menu bar.
Critically, if contents being presented is true pixel perfect 16:9 ratio and the window is not "fullscreen" or "maximized with hidden menubar", then the aspect ratio gets messed up, ruining what is otherwise perfection through a slice of "missing" content along one edge.
Indeed, more for presenting than actual task work IME.
Nice thing is this clock can show on other displays, too, in multi monitor setups, e.g. when auto-hide-menu is enabled. So sweet.
I think that's one of the appeals to full-screen mode: the ability to focus with limited distractions. I don't think it's designed for multitasking.
I think it's partly because alt + tab does not exist on Mac. Command + tab is between applications rather than windows. Command + ~ is between windows within an application. I had to downloaded HyperSwitch to get the same functionality.
edit: HyperSwitch is free. HyperDock is what I paid for.
(and of course, ⌘ ` opens the terminal on all of my machines)
[numbers made up, I don't know the exact values, but the general point still stands, and you can't change the speed!!]
Both variants (and of course an rcmd-like setup) are easy to do with Karabiner (free, Unlicense): https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/
Edit: looks like rcmd also includes a quasi-modal app switcher - if it works like I imagine (type the name of the app you want), that’s pretty neat. But not that different from just typing it into Spotlight I guess?
I use the mac app sizeup to get actual keyboard shortcuts to properly maximize a window, and also get split left/right top/down etc too. Mainly use it for legacy "fullscreen" convenience.
For work I will have VS Code and a web browser side-by-side. Every ticket I work on gets its own instance. I find it keeps me organized so I can focus on the work.
If Apple ever got rid of fullscreen mode I could probably just do this with normal virtual desktops. But this is slightly better than that.
Of course you don't get 12k pixels at 4800 fps or other large numbers and can't be blinded by misguided HDR, if you care about that.