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0 pointsseec3mo ago0 comments

Agreed. The problem is that native window management is pretty bad in macOS. And the 3rd party tools solving the problem aren't that great on top of being expensive sometimes.

Apple could fix it, but instead they made overlapping windows for iPadOS, which is even dumber considering the smaller display area.

I think it doesn't matter what they do; part of their clientele is fully captive, another part is only there for the status, and the last part is just using it rudimentally, so anything is OK.

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adi_kurian3mo ago

I think there are some pretty awesome third party tools. I am incredibly happy with my setup.

BetterTouchTool + Alt Tab + TaskBar is my setup.

All apps used with any frequency mapped to keyboard shortcuts, mostly using right side CMD key. CMD C Chrome, CMD V VS Code, CMD T Terminal, CMD F Figma, CMD S Slack, CMD E Edge, CMD OPT A Activity MTR, CMD OPT CTRL F Firefox and not that many more.

And then for windows, it's left side CMD OPT ENTER maximize, CMD OPT LEFT left screen, etc etc. And then others for quadrants. If I need to multiwindow, it's rarely more than 3 things, and most of the time it's just 2.

Having alt tab mean cmd tab is windows style is huge. Many of these things aren't directly related to window management but I find myself not thinking about it at all, when I used to think about it all the time with Macs.

iOS on iPad has split screen mode now. It's pretty decent. Wouldn't defend it tho.

seecOP3mo ago

Alt Tab is alright, but it's not as smooth as native Windows window management. It always has a lot of overlays/orphaned/invisible windows hanging out in there.

Something like that really needs to be implemented at the OS level to be trully competent.

TaskBar is cool but I'm not a fan of needing to have something like a dock constantly taking vertical space while we have the menu bar on top. After years of using both, I think Microsoft decision to bundle both into a single taskbar is just much better. And the menu bar is annoying when you use multiple monitors.

I personally use Moom for windows layout, which gives you something close to PowerToys and is pretty decent. Still, it is an added utility app that you have to pay for; Apple should ship it with the OS at this point.

iPadOS is almost irrelevant for productivity anyway; there are too many flaws and limitations, and all the software are expensive subscriptions. My point is that they had a blank slate to come up with something better but still decided to just copy what they already had, which completely defeats the purpose of having a newer platform/OS.

In the end, many of Apple's UI decisions looked good when computers were simpler, but nowadays they show their limitations heavily. Windows has many architectural flaws and not as good software for some niches, but the workflow feels better.

danans3mo ago

> Agreed. The problem is that native window management is pretty bad in macOS. And the 3rd party tools solving the problem aren't that great on top of being expensive sometimes.

Linux desktops have great ground-up support for tiling window management, whether as an optional behavior (Gnome/KDE/ChromeOS), or strict tile enforcement (i3/xMonad).

> I think it doesn't matter what they do; part of their clientele is fully captive, another part is only there for the status, and the last part is just using it rudimentally, so anything is OK.

It's too bad even technologists often fall into those categories these days.

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