Since the first taste of Linux WMs, I believe the best and only good way of handling window move and resize is super+lmb/rmb respectively. No more pixel-perfect header/corner sniping!
It really has gotten to the point where Linux offers the best option for a sane desktop experience. Watching Windows and macOS implode while KDE and Gnome slowly get better and better has really been something. Not quite at the point I'd recommend them for grandma and grandpa, but not that far off, either.
>In total the thickness went down from 7 to 6 pixels, which is a 14% decrease, making it 14% more likely to miss it.
Pedantic, but chance of miss is actually less than 14% more likely since the user's click location is not uniformly random over the thickness area, it's biased toward the center (normally distributed).
Screens are getting bigger and bigger, yet they make things smaller and harder to click on.
Back in the days when it was common for Macintosh to have 640x480 screens (or even smaller), they still fully visible window controls that were impossible to miss.
The interesting part, for anyone who actually reads the article - the change was fixed in an RC and then reverted in the final release.
Which implies there was some regression, some issue, some incorrect behavior or negative impact. One has to wonder… what could it have been? What could the issue with having a more accurate clickbox for the corner of the window possibly be?
What astounds me the most about this whole thing is that the sort of hit testing involved here is a solved problem in UI, and has been for decades, yet there are still plenty of others here and elsewhere arguing about how it isn't. Even with those horrid rounded corners it's not hard, as shown in the article, which makes me wonder whether there is some internal fight between those who didn't want rounded corners (developers?) and hence tried their hardest to make it buggier, and those who wanted them (designers?), with lots of back-and-forth that eventually gave us this outcome. A disturbing amount of time and $$$ was probably spent on it, as is usual for any bureaucracy.
The updates shipped by apple introducing more bugs every cycle. It is across the board, macos, ios and ipad os. The fact there is a group inside apple, that is capable of standing against common sense and users best interest for so long, tells how wrong things are internally.
It is the steve balmer - satya nadella moment of apple.
1. Plugging my laptop to the same desktop screens requires rearranging displays almost every time.
2. Airdrop stops working for no apparent reason.
3. Copy paste across devices no longer a stable mechanism.
4. The stupid new preview app crashing if you scroll pdf pages too fast.
And on and on. Those are all newly introduced critical bugs i have been facing since that flameboyant liquid glass virus took over.
Apple is a sillicon valley pioneer from the generation of hewlett packard (before it was called HP) bell labs and others. Watching a decay at its beginning is mind boggling and tragic.
Since we talk resizing windows, for months I was _sometimes_ unable to resize windows at all, and couldn't figure out why. I thought it was a random bug of macOS.
Finally I realized the issue: if a window spans across two displays, it won't resize. Insane!
(I have an external monitor up, laptop down, and it's easy to move a window such that it stretches a few pixels from monitor to the laptop. No resize for you!)
This is exactly the type of issue Steve Jobs would notice and then you're fired. The UI is the main event. If you can't get it right you don't work on it ever again.
I have a guess as to why this fix was delayed—on the release candidate, you weren't able to resize windows in Stickies. I filed a bug for it. This felt like a last-minute addition—the previous betas didn't have the 'fix.'
Let's think about why: if the width of the handle is based on the radius, and the radius is 0 for a window, there's nowhere for the grab handle to be.
I assume this wasn't the only app with fully square windows, and so the fix actually caused more problems. Respinning a release candidate is expensive, and they were out of time for this one. So the patch gets reverted and the fix gets iterated on for the next release, where they'll presumably figure something clean out that's conditional on exact window shape.
26.4 could be the spring hardware release or it could be the spring services release. I would give it a 2/3 chance of landing in 26.4, and a 1/3 of being moved to 26.5.
I’ve so far resisted using HN for tech support, but I’ll jump on the macOS hate bandwagon. My MBP M1 Max with 32 GB RAM has become near-unusable with Tahoe. Trying to switch users? Frozen. Click on something? Beachballs. There’s visible stutter and hangs in the lock screen animations. I hate it so much.
I’ve tried many apps for window resizing on Mac, and none feel like they’re nearly as good as FancyZones (the PowerToys module for Windows). I don’t want secret squirrel key combos. I don’t want hot corners.
I want two things:
- Predefined zones à la FancyZones
- Tied edges (there’s surely a better term for this) so that I can grab the edge between two apps and have them both resize together (one gets smaller as the other gets bigger).
Please someone tell me this exists without a subscription!
I switched from macOS to Linux ten years ago and haven't looked back. At the time, I compared Linux vs. macOS to living at home vs. in a hotel [1]. Since then, I feel things have only gotten better for Linux, and more restrictive and arcane on macOS.
The other incredibly annoying glitch in here, is that the resize cursor is only shown for foreground windows - but background windows are still resizable (despite the missing cursor) if you happen to drag their edges...
I’m a Windows guy, but was given a MacBook for my current job. Fair enough. But I laugh at how horrendous such a simple thing as resizing windows is. Want Slack to take up the right third of a screen then fill the rest with browser? In Windows, it takes 2 seconds. Not on Mac. I have to resize the window myself? There’s no auto-snap?
I’m sure someone will buzz in with some hidden way to do it. ‘Hold cmd-shft-9 then say these magic words and voila!’ No. Dragging the window with the cursor should suffice.
Edit: I’ll also add that having to buy a huge $200+ display adapter so you can connect 2 external monitors to a MacBook, whereas a slimline $30 device will do the same for Windows laptops, is total bullshit.
You have to wonder what’s actually going on under the hood when the curve of the hitbox is different to the curve of the window? I’m very curious to understand how Apple have got to this point.
I have never vibed with macOS's seemingly default mode of floating windows layered over one another like scattered paper on a desk (mimicking a desktop I suppose). Instead ive been using https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace for the past couple of years and just flicking around via hotkeys. Not perfect but much less friction for my use cases
It's amazing how much effort is wasted adding various OS degradation features (like poorly readable redesign) while bread & butter basics are broken for decades (it's a bad primitive to require pixel-perfect precision for resizing) and even get worse following those design gimmicks like rounded corners
(and, of course, custom radii would've helped, but users can't have such powers, Apple knows best)
I don’t think the problem is resolvable to everyone’s satisfaction, which speaks to the poor decision to make the windows that shape in the first place.
This is a perfect example of why I use raycast & their window management shortcuts:
alm - Almost Maximise window
tf - Toggle Full-screen
lh - Left Half
rh - Right Half
Resizing windows is easier when you don't have to grab the corner. Some people are talking about holding a key to resize on Linux but I don't want to be forced to use the keyboard.
My favourite solution on macOS is an app called Swish which lets you do trackpad/Magic Mouse gestures to throw windows into corners, along edges, etc.
You think this is bad? Try using Apple Music with a traditional mouse. You can’t even right click on half of the interface, dragging elements near to scrollable edges doesn’t trigger any scroll, and UI elements like the star on favourited songs just don’t show up. It’s marginally better on a trackpad.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
ivanjermakov|17 days ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/qv0vmz/missing_supe...
olivierestsage|17 days ago
learn_more|17 days ago
Pedantic, but chance of miss is actually less than 14% more likely since the user's click location is not uniformly random over the thickness area, it's biased toward the center (normally distributed).
pcurve|17 days ago
Back in the days when it was common for Macintosh to have 640x480 screens (or even smaller), they still fully visible window controls that were impossible to miss.
https://erichelgeson.github.io/blog/2021/03/23/ultimate-syst...
2bitencryption|17 days ago
Which implies there was some regression, some issue, some incorrect behavior or negative impact. One has to wonder… what could it have been? What could the issue with having a more accurate clickbox for the corner of the window possibly be?
userbinator|17 days ago
tzury|17 days ago
It is the steve balmer - satya nadella moment of apple.
1. Plugging my laptop to the same desktop screens requires rearranging displays almost every time. 2. Airdrop stops working for no apparent reason. 3. Copy paste across devices no longer a stable mechanism. 4. The stupid new preview app crashing if you scroll pdf pages too fast. And on and on. Those are all newly introduced critical bugs i have been facing since that flameboyant liquid glass virus took over.
Apple is a sillicon valley pioneer from the generation of hewlett packard (before it was called HP) bell labs and others. Watching a decay at its beginning is mind boggling and tragic.
jakub_g|17 days ago
Finally I realized the issue: if a window spans across two displays, it won't resize. Insane!
(I have an external monitor up, laptop down, and it's easy to move a window such that it stretches a few pixels from monitor to the laptop. No resize for you!)
rezonant|17 days ago
1970-01-01|17 days ago
dgxyz|17 days ago
ctbeiser|16 days ago
Let's think about why: if the width of the handle is based on the radius, and the radius is 0 for a window, there's nowhere for the grab handle to be.
I assume this wasn't the only app with fully square windows, and so the fix actually caused more problems. Respinning a release candidate is expensive, and they were out of time for this one. So the patch gets reverted and the fix gets iterated on for the next release, where they'll presumably figure something clean out that's conditional on exact window shape.
26.4 could be the spring hardware release or it could be the spring services release. I would give it a 2/3 chance of landing in 26.4, and a 1/3 of being moved to 26.5.
impish9208|17 days ago
neodymiumphish|17 days ago
I want two things:
- Predefined zones à la FancyZones - Tied edges (there’s surely a better term for this) so that I can grab the edge between two apps and have them both resize together (one gets smaller as the other gets bigger).
Please someone tell me this exists without a subscription!
mherrmann|16 days ago
1: https://fman.io/blog/home-and-hotel/
tambourine_man|17 days ago
Same for Intel.
What is it that lets companies which are leaders in a particular field for decades suddenly unable to do the basics.
swiftcoder|17 days ago
xvxvx|17 days ago
I’m sure someone will buzz in with some hidden way to do it. ‘Hold cmd-shft-9 then say these magic words and voila!’ No. Dragging the window with the cursor should suffice.
Edit: I’ll also add that having to buy a huge $200+ display adapter so you can connect 2 external monitors to a MacBook, whereas a slimline $30 device will do the same for Windows laptops, is total bullshit.
urbandw311er|17 days ago
marliechiller|17 days ago
eviks|17 days ago
(and, of course, custom radii would've helped, but users can't have such powers, Apple knows best)
Lucasoato|17 days ago
johnhamlin|17 days ago
chrisandchris|17 days ago
LastTrain|17 days ago
imprisonedmind|17 days ago
https://www.raycast.com/core-features/window-management
zapzupnz|17 days ago
My favourite solution on macOS is an app called Swish which lets you do trackpad/Magic Mouse gestures to throw windows into corners, along edges, etc.
j13n|17 days ago
w4rh4wk5|17 days ago