Making macOS Bearable

I wonder if the author is like me in that respect? Not sure I would spend time like this, but I also spent months building my Linux environment from a tty in 2009-2010 (landed on XMonad, finally on River this year after 5 months in GNOME purgatory to force myself to move to Wayland). Last macOS machine I set up, I turned off a bunch of stuff in Settings and was instantly bored because I just didn't want to deal with the window manager at all. It is now my video chat machine because of Dell's "wise" decision to use IPU7 hardware…but I really don't like using it for much else (Asahi reboots are tedious).

I personally use a tiling window manager when I feel like it but also get how it's personal preference :)

Most of the time, I only have Spotify, chat clients, my browser, and the terminal open. And I do prefer every one of them just having a fixed place behind a shortcut, which at this point is just muscle memory.

I deal with a huge number of different projects at work, for example. I have a workflow that imports the master excel spreadsheet and builds an instantly searchable database of every project, with links to all relevant portals and information. I can just start typing a project name or number (or other relevant info) and instantly jump to the project’s Sharepoint page, my local files directory, emails about that project, the publicly-accessible portal for it, etc etc. I use it constantly every day.

I also use Alfred to search industry-specific search engines, to draft repetitive emails for me, and to file things away. I have many little conveniences set up, like a workflow that configures various laptop settings based on location (printers, audio devices, volume level, etc).

Honestly if I had to choose between “Mac OS with no Alfred” and “Windows with Alfred,” I’d stick with Alfred. It’s such a helpful app.

I don’t use spaces or Mission Control or tiling. But I’ve been using macs since the late 80s and most of that stuff just seems superfluous. The fast global extensible subject-verb-object command shortcut is the only UI innovation that really changed my workflow since system 7 multitasking and osx having a cli.

I'd prefer to adopt a few of these programs than having to configure i3 and use ctrl for everything

It's also why I have a difficult time with Linux. Even the environments that are closest relatives to macOS are still quite distant, and so I end up getting sucked down a black hole trying to tweak my way closer to parity, which of course never works out. Linux only works for me for single-purpose machines where the desktop environment basically doesn't factor in.

An easy example is how the workspaces rearrange themselves be mort recent use, and worse on iOS there's some seemingly random time interval at which they move themselves after use.

In order for me to work using macOS without constantly bemoaning what feel like obvious shortcomings I need aerospace and quite a few scripts.

Another upside is (if your editor is properly setup to not lose data) that a page crash will never lose your precious long carefully crafted comment since it will persist in the editor

That's basically why I stopped using them altogether. I'm using COSMIC DE now on my Linux systems, and while it also has animations, it doesn't look nearly as bad as MacOS.

On MacOS I resorted to tiling and alt-tabbing my way through because of the delays. I don't want to wait for the window system to draw pointless animations, but I can't disable them.

And then in Sequoia they implemented primitive tiling too and of course decided they HAD to add a non-configurable, impossible to disable resizing delay on tiling which nearly brought me to install a VM and use the MacBook as a glorified VM host (before Sequoia it used to be instant).

Long animations between spaces, fullscreen creating a new window at the end of the list (??), slow processes to tile windows and efficiently use space, a lot of shortcomings with multi monitor setups, lots of dragging via touchpad to move and size windows across spaces.

1) (can be visual) you can setup cmd-tab to move between apps and alt-tab to move between one windows within an app (for example with alt-tab app)

2) (non-visual) with your window management prefix key setup two left/right cursor pairs like "JK" and "M," and use one to switch apps and the other to switch windows within an app (or maybe JL and IK in the inverted T cursor unless you're using up/down for something else)

https://manytricks.com/witch/

Among other features that might solve your problem, it lets you use your keyboard to filter by window title.

ctrl + downarrow (customize in Keyboard Shortcuts -> Mission Control -> "Application windows")

For me, grouping by app is terrible. Yes, they may all be "Terminal" or "Firefox" windows, but they are for very different things. I'd rather see things grouped by project regardless of "app". But that is what tagging window managers are for :) .

Given that macOS forces that (IMO) braindead tunnel vision paradigm, I think the response should be "Wù".

Joking aside, I actually solve this problem with my Tmux setup by using fuzzy search. I usually have 2-3 Tmux sessions where each one is a different project. The way I switch between them is by fuzzy finding.

I press a key, a pop-up appears, and after typing in three letters related to the project title, I'm already where I want to be.

I can imagine a similar solution where an application launcher can help you fuzzy find your way to a specific window based on the window's title. If the window doesn't include a project-specific title, then I'm out of ideas :)