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Comment by jasonpbecker | Hacker News Reader

I would understand this on a laptop screen, but on a large screen virtually only an IDE makes sense to use up all that real estate. Even on a 13" laptop, my browser is rarely extended to full width.

That being said, you can drag the window to the size you want and have nothing but window and menubar. There are also a ton of third party software to automate this as a keyboard shortcut or similar if that's the key. Then viola, no weird dependencies on a weird feature not designed for 23" + screens.

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> virtually only an IDE makes sense to use up all

I disagree, this is a strange sentiment that I see on HN all the time. That somehow the complexity of an IDE with dozens of debug windows and library organization trees deserve lots of screen real estate.

You know what deserves lots of screen real estate? Whatever I want to focus my attention on.

It could be a simple text editor, or VLC showing reruns of Road Runner cartoons while I balance my checkbook on another monitor, or a realtime log viewer in one screen and a process lister in antoher - point is, it doesn't matter, it's my way of working and it's not so bizarre that I need to acclimate myself to the clutter that inevitably shows up when using OS X for complex work.

The important thing is that I don't want all the other garbage I have backgrounded showing up in my field of view when I don't want to pay attention to it and I want this happen with a single mouse-click. This is a solved problem on virtually every other platform with a windowing metaphor in the last 25 years.

Apple's concepts around window resizing and full screen support make it seem like this is a problem so complicated we could solve P=NP and efficiently fold proteins with less effort.

I don't want to install addons, I don't want to spend several seconds breaking my work flow to resize windows just so or any other madness. This should have been solved with the first release of OS X, not the brain-dead hacks that keep getting shipped that nobody obviously thought to actually try and use in Cupertino.

> There are also a ton of third party software to automate this as a keyboard shortcut or similar if that's the key.

I do have an addon installed to solve this, but this is stupid core OS functionality and It's unbelievable that I'm living in the 21st century and full screening apps on multiple monitors requires years of waiting and entire OS upgrades.

Considering that mostly what I need to do on my Macs is virtualize Linux boxes, use MS-Office and ssh and run VLC, my next machine is going to be a Windows machine. Since

a) they're so cheap as to be virtually disposable

b) they haven't made core basic OS functions like moving files, accessing network shares without hanging the machine or Maximizing windows an unpossible task worthy of years of wait just to hope that they haven't screwed it up yet again and solved only by me wasting my time dragging things around or installing half a dozen third party kludges to hack the OS into something resembling a usable platform.

I'm not asking for weird edge case user environment things, or highly specialized workflows, or ultra-specialized niche window management or other things, just for the things to work as the user would expect.

I love love love my rMBP hardware-wise, but OS X as a user environment has been broken for a long time and it's regressing every release with problems that were solved on multiple platforms a human generation ago.

sorry venting

>The important thing is that I don't want all the other garbage I have backgrounded showing up in my field of view when I don't want to pay attention to it and I want this happen with a single mouse-click. This is a solved problem on virtually every other platform with a windowing metaphor in the last 25 years. ... > I don't want to install addons, I don't want to spend several seconds breaking my work flow to resize windows just so or any other madness. This should have been solved with the first release of OS X, not the brain-dead hacks that keep getting shipped that nobody obviously thought to actually try and use in Cupertino.

If you're spending several seconds to press a button on a toolbar you're already disrupting your workflow in a way directly comparable to resizing a window by grabbing a corner. If "disrupting your workflow" is such a huge concern you'd want a keyboard shortcut for this action anyway.

Sorry, but I actually think not full screening a window is actually the far superior handling in a world with high resolution, large screens. There are other ways to "hide" things you are background like using Spaces or whatever they're calling virtual desktops.

> I do have an addon installed to solve this, but this is stupid core OS functionality and It's unbelievable that I'm living in the 21st century and full screening apps on multiple monitors requires years of waiting and entire OS upgrades.

Ok. Seems like it takes virtually no effort one time to get the functionality you really want. If that's enough to make you super crazed and need a huge vent, that's fine. For me, that's a very plausible solution to a specific problem related to a preference that you likely developed because you are used to working on a different platform. It's true that:

> I'm not asking for weird edge case user environment things, or highly specialized workflows, or ultra-specialized niche window management or other things, just for the things to work as the user would expect.

... but you are asking for OSX to act like Windows has rather than how OSX has since it has had windowing (or at least as far back as my memory goes to the mid 90s). There was a choice made. It's a choice I didn't like when there weren't things like virtual desktops and when screen resolutions were lower and screen size was smaller. On a big screen with lots of pixels, I think it makes sense to double down on the traditional way they've handled enlarging windows.

To me, it just feels like Apple is dancing around just doing it the Windows way. Revision after revision they keep poking at the problem but don't want to do it the right way, and if feels like it's just because it was done first at Microsoft...which is silly IMHO.

All that being said, Windows needs to get on the multiple-desktop/workspace bandwagon. OS X's treatment of the subject is brilliant.

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