undefined | Better HN

0 pointskyzyl12y ago0 comments

This is true, and after much frustration I did finally deduce the intended behavior. However, it still isn't quite consistent (or rather, wasn't the last time I worked on a mac, circa 2008) and still seems to be lacking in functionality that the user actually wants.

In all my years of working with text editors, I don't think I've ever found myself thinking "This viewport is too small. I wish I could quickly resize it to just the width of the text, and maybe the height of the screen, or maybe something else, depending on what I'm doing." When my window is too narrow or whatever, I usually just (a) maximize it (which you can't to on osx), (b) dock it to half the screen (windows+left or windows+right on Win7+/*buntu, but not on osx) or (c) just quickly drag it over. So Apple effectively forced us to use only option (c), which is probably the least useful of the three sane options. The only other option is to use a feature that doesn't really do what we (or I, anyhow) want.

0 comments

3 comments · 3 top-level

welly12y ago

> In all my years of working with text editors, I don't think I've ever found myself thinking "This viewport is too small. I wish I could quickly resize it to just the width of the text, and maybe the height of the screen, or maybe something else, depending on what I'm doing." When my window is too narrow or whatever, I usually just (a) maximize it (which you can't to on osx)

I use Sublime Text 2 on OS X. When I click on the zoom button, it maximises the editor window to the entire width and height of the screen.

derefr12y ago

Mind you, text-editing wasn't the designed-for use-case; document-editing was. Open up Pages.app, if you have it, and create a new blank document. The zoom button will set the window to an optimal size for working on the (fixed-ratio) document page. Same for a canvas in Photoshop.

Amusingly enough, the only things it doesn't really work well for are things that reflow their content arbitrarily to fill the window: text, HTML, and terminals. The three things developers spend all their time looking at!

sprobertson12y ago

Anyone frustrated with the same should check out Slate [https://github.com/jigish/slate] which lets you bind key commands to window positioning and sizing and even screen layouts.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse