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Comment by genthree | Hacker News Reader

I sort of miss when my way of using GUI desktops involved the wallpaper sometimes being visible. These days It’s all quarter/half/full windows that rarely close, and certainly are never minimized.

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I don't think i ever have something fully maximized (aside from games, though even then sometimes i play in windowed mode). Even when i do maximize a window (which isn't often but some programs like Krita work better like that), the dock and miniwindows (i'm using Window Maker as my window manager) still take their own space and the background shows through. Also i often have a bunch of terminal windows minimized, then i forget about them and open new ones until at some point i go and garbage collect them :-P

Been auto-hiding the taskbar since Win 95, and feel the need for the feature all the more with the macOS dock. I doubt I’ve spent a collective hour without auto-hide on the dock in more than a decade of macOS :-)

Also, windows are not multiple. Each draw.io wants to be big rectangle because it is web garbage. Each chat program, unlike what Psi and QIP were

Depends on what I'm doing... but I'll often split windows, then stretch them to overlap slightly, or I'll have other windows that are always windowed over the top of others.

If I'm just browsing/chatting, I'll often just have one floating window centered.

It just depends on what I'm doing, how focused I am on task and how much space I really have.

macOS is still somewhat like this, if you avoid the "full screen" maximize just double clicking the titlebar will only grow the window to fit the content rather than have the window to fill the screen.

Its a lot like papers on a desk, and I know tons of folks here don't care for that model but I quite like it, especially in conjunction with stage manager.

I’m on macOS, it’s where I started working this way… uh… 12ish years ago.

Still using Spectacle for window management, despite its being long-discontinued. Still works, never a problem or glitch at all.

We had a lot more TUIs and transparent terms / libs with transparency. Things like Xchat, etc.

Oh, I was there for a good deal of it. Win 3.1 was my first GUI OS. Remember wacky compositor add-ons to x-window to get the wobbly windows and the really good transparency that doesn’t wait for you to stop moving the window to update, on Linux.

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.

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