I don't understand how MacOS is constently praised for its UI while half the comments here mention a third party app just to make it usable.
Maybe it's just me, but I owned a Mac for over 5 years and I could never wrap my head around how MacOS handles windows and open apps.
Because those like me who don't install any of those apps don't have anything to share on HN. Showing that you have a nearly default desktop isn't interesting except when people are claiming that no one does that.
I completely agree. I have used macOS since 2007 and the only thing I have really used as an extension is Alfred in place of Spotlight (although nowadays I am just using Spotlight). I am very happy with the UI as it is (on Linux I used everything from WindowMaker, KDE, GNOME, to tiling window managers).
Also I have many friends and family members who use macOS and I think none of them have third-party programs installed to modify the UI. So, you won't see them posting here about the extensions that they use.
And Raycast actually has the Rectangle functionality built in, although I prefer the separate app, there are some ‘defaults write’ values I can change on the command line that I like (to give me a wider bottom margin on my screen - I stick Silicio in the corner of my screen for instance.)
My two preferred macOS UX features (compared to other OSs) are:
- Respect for the user: macOS doesn’t show many confirmation messages, notifications, or ad-like things. Apple promotes products in the AppStore or shows you the usual “What’s new” during a new install. But, overall is very respectful, and that includes notifications about OS upgrades. By contrast, Windows is noisy. It asks for confirmation about everything, it has trial crapware in their home editions, and decides to install an OS update without asking in the worst possible moment.
- It just works (at least for the hardware I use). This is my main complain with Linux DEs. I know it improved a lot, but I still have memories of trying to make the Synaptic trackpad driver work or playing with xrandr to use multiple monitors during a presentation.
About the hidden shortcuts… well discoverability should be better. But, is also fun to discover those tricks.
"It goes full-screen - isn't that an expected outcome?"
Not exactly ...
First of all, for most of the life of OSX, clicking the green dot caused the window to resize larger, but not occupy full screen, by some measure I could never discern. That was always braindead.
Second of all, while the current behavior that I see (expand to literally full screen) is sort of an improvement (that is, at least it makes some sense) it's still badly behaved because bringing a window to literally full screen blanks out my other monitors (!@#) ... and now we're drifting into OSX treatment of multi-monitors which is another few layers of hell.
FWIW, IMO, the correct behavior is to maximize the window in the workspace - which is almost identical, but not quite, to the literal screen.
>it's still badly behaved because bringing a window to literally full screen blanks out my other monitors
Really? That's not what it does for me. Right at this very moment I have a full screen app running on my MacBook Pro screen and a desktop on my monitor. Do you have "Displays have separate Spaces" turned off in Mission Control preferences?
I rather disbelieve in the idea that these things have "correct" semantics; only "what I am used to". At this point, I'm very used to the way macOS works and I find it considerably more pleasant than other windowing environments. Being able to full screen an app and then multi-swipe left or right between spaces or up for App Exposé is natural to me.
I've no doubt I could unlearn this and learn something else though.
Personally, I would find it far, far more useful if it maximised the window rather than full-screening it. At the very least, having it configurable would be nice.
Hmm.. that doesn't quite do what I'm after — make it the full size of the screen. It looks like it's similar to the old macOS behaviour that made the window 'as big as its contents'.
It is exactly that behavior, yes (and that historical oddity is almost certainly why). I wish this was configurable somewhere, and wish the behavior of the green button was also configurable so you could flip it to “maximize with no modifier key, full screen with”.
All depends on what one is used to. On Linux I've had to fight with window borders so narrow by default (on whatever Ubuntu Studio uses) that they practically couldn't be resized. You had to aim at like one pixel. I read somewhere that a window could be resized by holding Alt and clicking with the middle mouse button... but on a Mac you never need to hold down keys and have a three-button mouse to do something that basic.
> but on a Mac you never need to hold down keys and have a three-button mouse to do something that basic
That's really not true at all, even for that exact thing. macOS still has very small clickable areas for resizing a window. Unless an app has focus, you don't even get the little two-sided arrows. And apps that are in dark mode basically all blend together because macOS either has no borders or like 1 pixel wide since macOS relies on shadows delineating windows, which only works for windows that are primarily light colors.
Ugg, I hate that. On Mac OS as well. Windows 8 had something like a 10px border that looked great. Tried to do the same on linux - modify some defaults - and it worked for a while until... it stopped working and I haven't been able to fix it.
But seriously - just make that configurable! Then everybody can be happy with their own settings. But no.... the new hotness is no usability for anybody.
Personally, I find macOS superior in its UI overall, but that doesn't mean it's flawless. Apple has made some very strange decisions and is painfully reluctant to row back on them. Keyboard support, in particular, is woeful.
Moving to double-clicking a folder replaces the open folder and _moves everything around_... argh! I want a visual UI to leave things just where I put them, dammit! Not to mention 30 years of muscle memory when they implemented that — without any System Pref to restore the old way.
Resizing windows is a weakness of Mac OS. It mostly retains the original fully manual method of dragging the edges of individual windows which is a fiddle process. There are some methods like mentioned in the original post, but that is about it. For that reason there are dozens of third-party tools, many free, that people use and like for their particular ways of working. It would be nice if Apple were to look at these and implement a basic verion of one or more of them in the OS.
The “stoplight buttons” on windows are part of a very opinionated solution to window management that works from some people but is a complete mess if you don’t like full-screen apps. I would prefer if we had the option to convert the full-screen button to a maximize window button. Double-clicking on the window header is close.
The other thing that Windows users complain about it that closing a window doesn’t close the app. That one is just a confusion because they are used to how Windows windows. The Mac OS convention of keeping the app active is not wrong, it’s just a different approach and the kind of conceptual change that users need to make when they switch OSs.
Closing the window and not closing the app is great and one of my favourite things from switching to macOS from Windows. At the same time, the Zoom thing is ridiculous. Some apps do the right thing (e.g., Firefox), while some leave you scratching your head (Finder).
Ctrl + Opt + Return is the only reason I have Rectangle installed.
I use computers for media production, Chrome, and VS Code. Considering macOS is a Unix with a UX that is more or less targeted to creative types, it means that I don’t have to do anything other than installing a few apps and homebrew to get a system that does 99.9% of what I want. macOS then becomes a mouse cursor and a few touchpad gestures. The UX customizations I configure are in the programs I use, not the OS. macOS’s UI therefore provides the least friction.
There are so many bugs in the OS and I just work around them.
Two recent ones I can think of:
Issue 1 is: Shift+click selection doesn't work in Finder's Icon view.
To reproduce: In finder select the "icons" view. Click on the first item, Hold shift, and while holding shit then click on the tenth item.
Expected behavior is to select Items 1-10 including ten.
Workaround: Switch to list view.
Issue 2: Lock screen keyboard shortcut doesn't work when mission control is activated.
To reproduce: Open mission control via app or hot corner. Press Control+Command+Q to lock screen. Screen won't lock.
Workaround: Deactivate mission control view before locking screen.
Yea...it's dumb. But in the words of the late great Steve Jobs, 'don't hold it that way'. I get that apple is different. But sometimes it just seems counterintuitive.
To reproduce: In finder select the "icons" view. Click on the first item, Hold shift, and while holding shit then click on the tenth item.
I don't think that's a bug. The icon view does not have an inherent ordering, since you can just drag icons around. What is supposed to be the range to select if you have an unordered view.
Issue 2: Lock screen keyboard shortcut doesn't work when mission control is activated.
That looks like a bug. Interestingly, it does work on the new external Apple keyboards when you press the key that also has Touch ID.
Still, icon view is usually a grid of icons, there is an implied order there, also you can set the sort order to any number of properties. I’m not particularly bothered by this, but it seems like you should be able to select a range of icons with shift-click like any other list of items.
The first one is not a bug, it's designed like that. Icons in icon view can be positioned arbitrarily and have no order. You can't easily extend the selection with shift clicking because in that view, it's not obvious what that gesture is supposed to be extending beyond the thing being clicked on. It's worked like that since MacOS Classic.
Sure one can find all sort of arguments why this is, but it still violates the principle of least surprise. I don't think anyone would go and say, "oh this is an icon view without clear order, so I should not be able to select a group of icons".
It doesn't violate the principle of least surprise if you're basically inventing the convention, which is the case here. There's a slightly different convention in some subsequent systems but they typically don't have arbitrarily positionable icons. The MacOS convention has been around for nearly 40 years.
I hear ya on issue 2, it’s one of the very few gotchas I run into (hot corners don’t work in this view either). If you weren’t aware, you can exit mission control with ESC or F3 again, if you’re used to that shortcut.
There must be something special about the overview screen that is stopping all default behaviour when in this mode, the cursor keys don’t work here either.
A number of the other comments explain how to configure the UI to allow for similar functionality; e.g… with 3 finger drag.
I found the article to be a little odd… awing at 3rd party apps basically replicating baked in features.
Although to be fair I am super meticulous in going through the accessibility and gesture features to get the UI feel just right for my tastes. MacOS, to me, feels like a clunker out of the box.
It feels like they're just being stubborn with the window management. Like they chose how it should all work ages ago, and they don't want to admit that some of the choices are bad. They drug their feet on right-click forever as well.
I have a few quality of life apps that take me a couple minutes to set up on a new machine. I spent like 2 months debugging bluetooth problems on my arch machine. Don't even mention Windows in my presence.
macOS is not usuable without a proper tiling window manager. You double click on a window and it enlarges, but doesn't take all of the screen. Seriously, wtf?
You fail to understand the difference between ‘usable’ and ‘works according to my exotic preferences’.
If you ‘need’ a tiling window manager, MacOS is not for you, Apple is never going to add one and is only going to cripple attempts by third parties to do so.
You fail to understand the difference between owning an OS and merely using it the way Apple intended. macOS is notorious for poor handling of windows, I don't need to explain that.
No, MacOS is an opinionated OS, well known for the droves of armchair UI designers smugly criticizing it while they keep buying the hardware. It has been that way since forever.
I know very few people on any desktop os that don’t use plugins or third party apps to customize their experience but it’s only when macOS is discussed that it gets painted as something outrageous.
Have you ever noticed that you can't cut and paste files with right click or the drop down menu in OSX?
It's been a few years since I've used OSX, but every version I've ever tried has this intentional bug. I say intentional because when I first got a mac in the 10.4 days I noticed that 'cut' was greyed out in the menu so I thoughtfully filed a bug report. To their credit they did answer the bug report several years later but they explained that they would not fix this as it is desired behaviour.
I think this may be a misunderstanding on your part (no disrespect). Cut/paste works slightly differently on macOS compared to Windows. There's no actual concept of "cut". You just "copy" whatever files you want. When you're ready to paste, you can hit Cmd+V to "paste" or Cmd+alt+V to "paste and remove the original file(s)".
The benefit is that you don't have to decide whether you want to just "copy" or "cut" before you're ready to "paste", which makes a lot of sense if you're not coming from a Windows background. But yes, migrating from Windows to macOS makes this feel confusing.
If you want to copy a file in OSX with your mouse you use the menu bar whereas if you want to cut and paste (move) a file in OSX with your mouse then you use the two open windows method that you describe.
They are both very different and one isn't so discoverable.
What's the worst about this is that it's purely a choice and Apple intentionally greys out the cut option in the menu bar.
The mac model since the beginning is direct manipulation, not "select subject then apply verb". Obviously there are plenty of exceptions (for example text editing does include cut/paste!) but that's the baseline approach. And Windows made some specific design decisions to be different from Apple to reduce conflict (i.e. lawsuits).
In addition the UX research on direct manipulation vs select-and-operate seems to have shown that the mac made the right call, but the only work I've read in that area was done long ago.
This BTW is why shift-select doesn't work in icon mode (as a different commenter posted) because it was confusing for some people in a way that just drawing a selection for icons is not.
