> I still get frustrated on OSX when I minimize a window and have to hunt around for it
Windows user here. Honest curiosity: does anyone know why the minimize / maximize works on the Mac the way it does? I mean, what's the rationale to design it like this?
Different ways of working, mostly stuck in our own ways of doing things.
I rarely, if ever, use Minimize on the Mac. Minimize comes from Windows (and other windowing systems) where the window minimizes to an icon or button on the task bar.
"Maximize" also comes from Windows (and other windowing systems.) As others have noted, in newer macos (which I don't use,) I think it oddly makes the window go full screen. Full screen is a recent macos feature -- I once asked about making my Application go full screen and Apple developer support said that going full screen did not follow their Human Interface guidelines. Something seems to have changed at Apple since I asked about that decades ago.
There was no Maximize on the Mac, it is called "Zoom." The idea is that the window has two sizes and you zoom between the two sizes: One size is the size the user has resized the window to (often with much difficulty) and the other size is an ideal compact size ("optimally fit content") without hiding anything and hopefully where scroll bars do not appear -- it is a UI feature that is/was rarely, if ever, done very well by applications other than the Finder.
By the way, Command-Tab to switch tasks was once an add-on from Microsoft for Mac OS. Go Microsoft! (Mac fanboy here :)
All correct. In daily use, I almost never use those buttons - I end up manually sizing/placing windows.
The the MacOS scheme of doing this leads a sort of organic, emergent window layout - I always end up with windows staggered to display relevant bits. With Windows (and with most window managers, X), things always end up either strict tiled or stacked.
I'm very used to the Mac way and prefer it, but that could just be the result of long use. It doesn't waste space (Windows apps always seem to have lots of dead space to me and makes me work to be able to see parts of other windows) and forces me to switch windows far less. But it is a fiarly subtle thing.
The amount of tedious manual work required to resize and arrange several windows on MacOS (6+ to latest OSX) bothered me all the time I had a misfortune to have to use it. It does not even have something like edge snapping.
My WM of choice is now Xfwm, which allows to rearrange windows easily without gaps, make windows fill available space (vertical and horizontal separately), or tile them by dragging to corners.
On OSX, things like Spectacle and Magnet sort of help.
The lack of window and edge snapping are exactly the reason I prefer MacOS behavior. If it did that, partly revealing lower windows would be far more tedious/impossible.
For me, the goal is not to maximize available space to the frontmost windows; it is to maximize the use of the monitor to display what's currently relevant. It allows me to do things like keep a Finder window open with just a bit peeking through to drag things to, keep an eye on a few lines of a terminal tail -f, see the mailbox pane and room pane in Mail/Slack so I can see if anything new happened I should respond to, etc. all while working on whatever I'm working on.
With the Windows-ish "maximize the window", that is replaced, almost invariably, by useless window background.
Again, I expect this is mostly what one is accustomed to, and the Macish approach is more idiosyncratic to the user. Works for me.
Edge snapping does not prevent the behavior you describe; sometimes it even makes it easier to do. You can still rearrange and resize the windows manually as you wish. But when you want two edges to fit snugly, it's easy to do.
Also, you can maximize a window for a moment, look at it, and then unmaximize it back to its previous size.
Interesting. Now that you've made me think about it, I've realized that I use Windows more like a single-threaded operating system. I only ever flip between applications (ignoring my second monitor). I never, ever, combine multiple applications on the same monitor - this is crazy because this was the Windows 95 promise. Not that it's a bad thing, I'm used to the workflow and love it.
I absolutely agree with your guess as to why this is.
in Maximized state the window is set to maximal available size (so you are not wasting any part of the screen) while you are still provided with fast and easy access to relevant OS UI elements
in full screen you explicitly tell the system that you don't want to be distracted by OS UI elemtents (typically in situation when you know that you won't need them for extended period of time, or if you REALLY need every single pixel of the screen)
I feel your pain. I was using BetterTouchTool to remap the default behavior of that green +, but eventually decided it was silly to use an add-on for something I should be able to change via `defaults`, so I just trained myself to hit Option when I wanted to maximize.
I'm came from ~18 of Windows & Linux usage and everyone always told me macOS is THE OS with the best usability.
But I can't confirm this.
Minimization of windows is shitty and maximization even more.
When I maximize, often just the height is changed, when I go back to "normal" the height and the width is changed, so I always have to adjust the width manually.
When I minimize a few windows, it's impossible to get back the right one without luck.
Know what you're talking about. Since I've switched back to Linux I can't imagine working without workspaces - each one dedicated for specific task/app - and every time staying with specific order so e.g. 1 workspace: Browser, 2nd: Code editor, 3rd: Terminal, 4th: File explorers etc. I used to it so much that I automatically use shortcuts to access it immediately - switching between minimized windows using alt + tab keys is a nightmare.
Windows 10 actually supports this feature, still can't get used to it though... win+tab -> switch between virtual desktops, or ctrl+win+left/right arrows.
and if you have many windows open (in win 10 at least) you don't have to press alt+tab 10 times in a row to choose your desired program, you can hold alt+tab and use arrows.
Yes you can, it was added in the Creators update. Hit win+tab and right-click the window, you can choose to show that single window across all desktops or all windows from the app across all desktops.
You can accomplish (mostly) the same thing with Spaces on Mac. Granted, I don't believe you can really script any of it. All manual, but it still works pretty well for me.
Some days I still really miss dwm, but having Photoshop, Ableton, and several other things Just Work™ makes it worth it.
The problem with spaces is that any time you cmd-tab between spaces, those spaces will be repositioned relative to each other to be adjacent. This also happens whenever a window opens a dialogue that forces you to switch to it. This means that you can't reliably keep spaces in a strict order.
Yes, this is something I do to on linux, and it's great particularly when you're doing something that gets quite messy with lots of windows open - when you're working with lots of files, or you the program (like GIMP) opens up several windows. If you need to do something else it's so nice to just leave it all and move onto a nice clean workspace without having to minimize everything.
You do have multiple workspaces on Windows 10... Though if you mean "automatically assign application X to workspace Y", which many Linux WMs are able to do, you're out of luck.
I used to use VirtuaWin[1] on Windows, which adds virtual desktops to it. It's possible it doesn't work in the most recent Windows (although, given Win compatibility, it could just as well work), but until Windows 7 (when I stopped using Windows) it was a life-saver. I used Enlightenment (E16) on some of my computers back then and after working with multiple desktops I just couldn't live without them. I mostly use 3x3 layout, with the main application I work with at the center, and other applications to the sides. Works great for me!
After using a mac for ~6 months now, I finally understand what happened to gnome3/unity, clearly designed by mac users.
I mean it's perfectly usable once I got the basic gestures down and installed the app that let me independently set the track pad and mouse wheel scroll directions, but will go so far as to say that both xfce and MATE are objectively better at window management.
Partly I think their hands were tied by the too late to change decision for the always there contextual top menu bar. Or this is just 25 years of using win95 clones talking and I'm set in my ways.
I wouldnt say Gnome is by or for mac users. In fact in many ways it is way more similiar to Metro than to OSX. Gnome 3 just broke the common Windows 95 workflow, however many others did before.
Personally i love it but it took me way more than 10 minutes to realize why :) IMO it is highly underestimated, mostly because you need to change your workflow which takes time, but when you did it feels super productive.
You wouldnt judge i3 or other completely different approaches after only a few minutes.
I feel absolutely the same about Gnome 3. One of the biggest things, I think, is that it puts workspaces absolutely in your face, so using them is a much more natural part of the workflow than in Gnome 2. It's also more keyboard-friendly than Gnome 2 (though it still could use some work in this area). Despite being rather large (gnome-shell on Wayland is typically the second-biggest RAM user on my laptop), it feels minimalistic, and is almost always fast, and stays out of the way of whatever I'm working on.
> it feels minimalistic, and is almost always fast, and stays out of the way of whatever I'm working on.
absolutely :)
What i like the most is you are just a super key tab away from basically everything so focus on a single thing feels natural and right. There is no way to lose anything either, its all there. Always.
I'm going to have to give it another go then, though I do love my MATE desktop.
The last time I tried it, I got frustrated when working with a lot of pdf sources - hitting the super key just presented me with a myriad of white rectangles where open windows would frequently rearrange requiring a slow manual search to find the file I was looking for. This can be less of a problem with a taskbar, as the filename is the main identifier, and being 1 dimensional it is easier to scan and preserves its position better.
What's strange on a mac is somehow having the ability to completely lose windows.
Another frustration is trying to view two apps together on the screen at the same time, if one of the apps itself contains multiple windows. I'm not at my desk to try this but let's say you have multiple chrome windows open, all with their own tabs, and you want to view your current chrome window overlayed on a window from another app. To do this you have to manually minimise all of your chrome windows one by one so they will all move of the way, to allow you to switch between apps and view them both at the same time.
Four fingers up, expose.
Drag the windows you need up top into a new desktop.
Command (or control? Or option? Or a combination?) Plus the right arrow to switch desktops.
Try all the combinations until I get to the right desktop or throw the damn thing out a window.
Somehow it is able to open up the device manager and THEN give the window in the background focus when I switch to my editor and back to Xcode with cmd+tab.
So I have to move the Xcode window down, to grab that backgrund thing what seems to be part of Xcode.
Classic Mac OS (System 7 was contemporary to Windows 95) didn't really have any concept of minimisation or even maximization as such.
There was no task bar or dock or anything else really to minimise to. IIRC there were addons for 7.1 that added "window shading": a button on the window title bar that reduces the window to just the title bar.[1]
The closest thing to a maximise button in classic Mac OS was more like a size-to-fit button: the application gave the window manager a hint which was the appropriate size for the document displayed, be it a file folder, a word processor document or whatever. Having a single window fill the entire screen wasn't as common as it was on Windows.
None of this was particularly strange to me back then.
Sure it did, namely Windows 1.0, 2.10/2.11 (actually Windows/286 and Windows/386), but very few people used them.
Windows 3.0 was the first one to have some diffusion, but it had very limited capabilities, and it's adoption was slow because of the increased specifications for the PC, and in any case not comparable with the later wide adoption of 3.1.
> Having a single window fill the entire screen wasn't as common as it was on Windows.
Yup! For the longest time I liked to work with a half-width browser window to match my half-width editor & word processor windows. It drove me crazy the number of websites which set their body text to some fraction of the window width, which looked good with a fullscreen window but terrible with a halfscreen one.
Eventually I just gave up. The whole point of the web was device-independent information transfer, but somehow we allowed device-dependence to sneak it.
MacOS System 7 did have a function like minimize for Apps (not individual windows). In the finder menu on the upper right, you could "hide" or "show" a program and use the same menu to switch apps, similar to the task bar in Win95.
macOS has Hide & HideOthers in addition to Minimize. I go weeks at a time without using minimize because of those.
IMO there's a whole generation of people who did their early computing on MS Windows (including myself) and so internalised that that is how GUIs are "supposed to work". When moving to something else later in life there's a feeling that it is "wrong", but it (e.g macOS)'s way of doing things is also correct and is just a divergent evolution to MS Windows. Research, open-mindedness and experimentation are necessary when using something different.
I'm new to macOS. Thank you. I need these tips. It's really annoying in the differences, but I'm sure thre are more hidden things that are useful I suspect I am not alone
Thanks, this is the first answer to this question that sort of makes sense from a Windows user point of view. I mean I still prefer the "Windows way", but this is at least viable reasoning for the "Mac way".
Depending on how you've configured your Dock, Minimize is pretty simple. Either the window just moves to the Dock, or it minimizes into the application icon (then you can right-click on the Dock icon to view a list of the windows that are minimized, or click to open the last minimized window)
Maximize on Mac was NOT designed for the window to fill the whole screen, but rather to resize the window to optimally display its contents. E.g. maximizing a Preview window with a PDF document changes the width of the window to the PDF page width. (Good tip for getting along with your Mac: stop trying to maximize everything.)
In a recent macOS version, Apple changed the green "maximize" button to full-screen, which is very different from maximize. Now double-clicking on most window chromes will execute the old maximize behavior.
> Maximize on Mac was NOT designed for the window to fill the whole screen, but rather to resize the window to optimally display its contents.
The problem with this approach is I definitely do not need someone else making the decision of what is "optimal" for me.
I've been using macOS for about as long as I used to use Windows now, and at this point, macOS seems to have largely abandoned the concept, which is great. Applications get either a full screen in their own isolated context, or option-click for a full-screen in a regular windowed context. The options now are a very windows-95/98 like: "either go completely full screen, or resize to whatever you like," which gives me full control of what I find optimal for any given application.
The difference is that Windows never really embraced universal drag and drop and the Mac did.
Macs used drag and drop for file management between windows representing separate locations on disk. Windows users tended to select files and choose cut or copy then navigate to the second location and paste.
The same held true for moving content between documents in an application or moving content between applications. Mac users preferred to use drag and drop, while Windows users relied on copy and paste.
The problem with keeping every window maximized is that you're giving up system wide drag and drop as the primary user interaction method.
That's a great distinction I hadn't thought of before, and it definitely makes sense - if you're focusing on drag-and-drop, you want as many windows visible somewhere on the screen as possible to maximize possible destinations.
Personally, I find drag-and-drop handy sometimes but it's very constraining. You have to go through non-standard motions to complete any more that is more than trivial, always holding down the primary mouse button and thereby losing your primary way of interacting with the interface. In other words, sure, if you have a clear view of your destination, then yeah, drag and drop is fine, but in all other instances, it becomes clunky.
Cut/paste is incredibly quick and doesn't sacrifice usability of your interface or input methods between the two ends of the transaction. Windows seemed to balance this out well, where you could drag and drop most of the time, but you could also ALWAYS cut/paste. I despise that I can't cut/paste in finder. Which is why I use PathFinder instead.
The danger cut/paste DOES pose is it fundamentally unlinks the start of the transaction and the end. In between, you can do literally anything, which may mean losing track of what's in your paste. Still, I'd call this a fair trade-off, specifically because it is non-destructive for files. You won't lose a file to to paste. It just stays put.
> In between, you can do literally anything, which may mean losing track of what's in your paste.
On Windows Ditto, and on Linux CopyQ (among others, and there has to be something like that for Mac) solve this problem, by giving you a preview of what's in the clipboard as well as the history copies you made.
I've seen users cut files from one location and forget what they are doing before they manage to find the destination they intended to move those files to.
Then they are shocked later when they paste those files into some random location and can't figure out where they went.
Dragging and dropping does not have that issue. Users find it much easier to learn.
Open the source window. Open the destination window. Drag.
>The problem with this approach is I definitely do not need someone else making the decision of what is "optimal" for me.
And that's the crux. The whole feature (in its original incarnation) rested on the false assumption that there's a singular "optimal" state at any given time.
The Apple Human Interface Guidelines have been a state-of-the-art reference for good UI for a long time, but the part about the zoom button always baffled me, as it directly contradicted several Core Principles laid out in Part I of the book.
The reason this is done is of course that most applications don't have content that fill the entire screen, so maximizing, in most cases, is meaningless - and hinders the usability of the system.
It makes more sense to leave some space over for other apps than have a big empty area on both sides of the screen.
Interestingly, I noticed that it's only Windows-switchers who complain about this. People who've used Mac for a long time don't give this any thought.
> most applications don't have content that fill the entire screen, so maximizing, in most cases, is meaningless
It's a matter of where you place responsibility. It's like saying, "most websites aren't responsive, so naturally it makes sense to restrict the size of your browser window and leave space for other apps." But most would laugh at this and say it's the responsibility of the website/webapp to build a responsive layout. Why should we hold desktop applications to a different standard?
I completely that it is probably almost entirely windows-switchers who complain about it. I'd, obviously, self-aggrandizingly suggest it's because we've tasted something better. People don't complain about the taste of food they've never tasted ;)
>It's like saying, "most websites aren't responsive, so naturally it makes sense to restrict the size of your browser window and leave space for other apps."
I think that's a misrepresentation. It's not a static size. It's not an artificial limit. If the document that's open has content to fill the entire screen, the window will fill the entire screen.
For minimize I can't say. But the maximize works the way it works because (and this is according to the platform ideology, not some general truth) you are not supposed to maximize windows in the Windows sense of the word.
The macOS interface is based around floating and overlapping windows. If you put a window over the whole screen then it could be as well maximized. This gets a bit hairy on smaller screens but really shines on huge monitors. In general macOS is more optimized around having one big screen rather than a multi-monitor setup.
I do not know how the interface looked back then (I was not even born), but I can imagine that at that time a lot in interface design had yet to be discovered.
But seriously, minimising windows is a reflex learnt from Windows. In Windows you often need to minimise one thing to find something else. Especially the desktop. On a Mac you can usually find something more quickly in the dock. In Windows you’re far more likely to have an app maximised by default, and minimising is a natural way to switch tasks. On a Mac, minimising is not a natural way of task switching.
It drove me nuts when they updated the maximize button behavior to full screen.
I use ShiftIt, a neat little Open Source tool that help me manage windows sizes and positions (including minimizing and maximizing): https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt
I've recommend it to pretty much any Mac user I've met.
Haven't used ShiftIt, but I've been using Spectacle to accomplish the same thing. They seem pretty similar, overall. Works pretty well and I've had no issues.
I used Spectacle for years than was forced to switch to ShiftIt at a new employer. ShiftIt default hotkey combos didn’t conflict with other apps like Spectacle.
No idea... And a few versions ago Apple changed the maximize button to go full screen, which made it useless for the 95% of us who don't use one app at a time. Minimized windows also used to show up at the bottom of the screen when using "Expose", but then Apple changed the name to "Mission Control" and removed them. Just one more example of them slowly but surely driving its Mac customers away.
It depends on the definition of 'at the same time', but I think that many people in a work environment at the very least use an e-mail client and a productivity application at the same time. Also throw in a calendar for good measure.
I think that Apple thought that many regular users would switch to full screen apps on the Mac, combined with Launchpad (it's just like an iPad/iPhone). But virtually all non-tech-savvy Mac users that I know do not use Launchpad, nor fullscreen apps.
I think the problem with Launchpad as with Spotlight search [1] is that they are not very discoverable on the Mac. Having search in an application menu (like recent Windows versions and some Linux desktops) is far more discoverable.
I guess people don't use fullscreen apps because they equate desktops/laptops to the 'WIMP' interface paradigm.
[1] If I received a penny every time I see even experienced Mac users launch applications by clicking on a Dock icon or by navigating to the Applications folder in Finder, rather than using Spotlight, I would be rich.
Only after reading your comment did it occur to me that I should set up applications in the Launchpad the same way I have them organized on my iPhone (or like Win 3.1's "Program Groups" or Start Menu folders) and stop using the Dock to hold the applications I use most often. Maybe that would help keep track of which applications I have open, and where my minimized apps keep going off to!
You sure you are not confusing it with iOS? That's where you always have strictly only one app in fullscreen!
(Yes, yes. It is a lame joke. But who uses only one Window at a time? What is the point of that? Though I remember when I used OS X you could swipe left (or right) to switch back to all other apps. So I think that was good enough.)
That's a very un-Classic-Mac-like way of using windows.
In the olden days, Mac users would tend to have lots of overlapping windows. Dragging anywhere on the window edges would move the window, so it was easy to arrange them as you wanted - almost like shuffling bits of paper on your desktop (strangely enough) and if you wanted to move something out of the way, you could fold it up (window shade). There was no need for maximising or minimising and "zooming" just meant "make this as large as makes sense for this particular document", not "expand to take up all the space on my desktop"
As OSX/macOS has developed, all that document/desktop-style behaviour has been lost.
They're talking about a window sized to the maximum space as if you click and dragged its edges out as far as they can go or just used a tool like Divvy.
You're talking about the "fullscreen" feature which I always found very weird. For example, ever forget your video was "fullscreen"ed as you try to alt-tab to it only to realize it's a 4-finger swipe to pull it back up. Making the user have to differentiate will always be bizarre to me.
Speak for yourself. Spaces in macOS is one of the best window management features I've encountered. Of course, it's been common in Linux window managers, but since I use a Mac for work, its a godsend that spaces and multiple desktops is implemented. I'm a developer, and being able to organize my windows and split them (fullscreen isn't limited to one app per screen anymore) is so freaking useful that I feel lost whenever I try to use Windows again.
> Minimized windows also used to show up at the bottom of the screen when using "Expose", but then Apple changed the name to "Mission Control" and removed them.
Windows user here. Honest curiosity: does anyone know why the minimize / maximize works on the Mac the way it does? I mean, what's the rationale to design it like this?