As an adult, I've switched back to the bottom. Teenage-me's reasoning wasn't wrong per se, but in practice I feel 16:9 screens already provide sufficient vertical space, whereas I like having more horizontal space to keep multiple windows open at a time. When I was a teenager, I usually just kept everything in full screen anyway.
- Resolutions improving/increasing has made multiple windows per screen feasible, in past you pretty much had to do full screen and toggle windows to multitask
- Mouse/scroll support followed. I can scroll on an inactive window these days. In past, you had to toggle and put focus on the window to be able to scroll, meaning you had to toggle windows to multitask
- Multitasking has become so multi. I am engaged in different apps/windows and need to watch them. I might have open a video on an eighth of my screen too just to watch something as I work. The only app I can think that came close to this in the past was AIM.
Select/single click paste. This is the big one. it turns copy/paste from a deliberate action to a natural motion. It always surprises me how infuriating going back to hotkey copy/paste is.
Point to focus. Point your mouse at what window you want to be active. Not a huge deal but it goes well with the next point.
Don't raise on click. usually I want a window where I am looking something up. And a window I am working in. I hate it when the window I am working in jumps to the top on focus obscuring the window I am looking at. It should only raise when I click a specific spot(usually the border).
If you get this far you realize that overlapping windows are not doing much for you. so you start using tiling window managers. Unfortunately some applications interact badly with tiling window managers. If you have such an application you may never reach this point of desktop efficiency.
Envious since I probably can't replicate all of your features on MacOS.
Don't raise on click: if you can remember to cmd-click, this mostly works, even with right-clicking. The window receives the click and doesn't raise.
Point to focus: you can get this with yabai [0]; note that it recommends disabling SIP (and keeping it disabled) so that it can install some hooks into Dock.app, but you don't need to do that if you only want focus-follows-mouse.
select/single-click paste: you can get pretty far with hammerspoon (hs.eventtap to notice mouse drags, double-, and triple-clicks, and then use hs.uielement to get the text that is selected), but it's handicapped by apps that don't play nicely with accessibility (browsers and electron apps in particular come to mind). [1] has an alternate way which notices selections as above and then uses hs.eventtap to send synthetic cmd-c keydown/keyup events, but I haven't tried it.
edit: now that I think about it, I think you might be able to do the don't-raise-on-click behavior with hammerspoon as well, by capturing click events, checking their `mouseEventWindowUnderMousePointer` property (see [2]), and if that is not the window that is currently focused, block that event and send a synthetic copy with cmd- added (and if cmd- is already in the mod mask, treat it as "I want to raise that window" and do the opposite -- block the event, copy it and remove the cmd- modifier, and post that synthetic event)
[0] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai [1] https://github.com/Hammerspoon/hammerspoon/issues/2196#issue... [2] https://www.hammerspoon.org/docs/hs.eventtap.event.html#prop...
When I use my Windows machine, it's probably the feature I miss most. I've asked my IT people at work, and they tell me there's no way to disable the screen saver on demand in Windows. I don't know if that's an OS thing, or just one of their policies.
Conversely, Option-top right corner activates the screen saver.
on Windows, the process involves taking a Power Request. A Display power request keeps the display awake, and is the overriding above most all else. It's trivial to do with a little PowerShell ( https://blog.backslasher.net/windows-awake-ps.html ) though the fine folks at Microsoft have included it in their standard set of PowerToys as Awake: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/awake
Last I remember, this keeps you from having a screensaver come up.
I suppose they could have deployed some group policy that disables this behavior. That'd be annoying if it's the case.
So poke around.
https://www.softpedia.com/get/System/System-Miscellaneous/Di...
(So you can't pin it to a corner like the top left, nor can you force it to extend over the full length of that edge.)
And you can extend the Dock in many ways, by adding folders or stacks, make them behave as menus or grids, ect.
Maybe another distro would work out better. I'm not opposed to switching, but I don't have the time to invest in exploring other options. I still sorta know where a find a bunch of weird settings and stuff in Ubuntu, so it would be a bit of a pain to lose that knowledge.
I've been using XFCE since 2003ish. On a laptop, I put all the panel business on the right hand side. On a multiscreen desktop, I use the tops of each display, with different things on each, with dynamically informative things on the left and application shortcuts on the right. On a giant screen, I maintain the same concepts as multiscreen but typically use the "smart hiding" feature on the right side panel, plus a corral for minimized applications.
Focus follows mouse; windows don't overlap. On a laptop I generally want no more than 2 windows per virtual screen, and the ability to flip through them very quickly. On a desktop, again: dynamic on the left, static on the right.
I use Gnome and the top bar is far from a checkbox for stylistic design for me. On it are applets that I use multiple times everyday (Calendar, Caffeine, a few custom applets, VPN controls, etc).
The author assumes that utility would come from something like a global menu which is also a choice, as I access menus only using the keyboard and not mouse.
I do love the magic corner though.
Now why "right" side? Well because I'm right handed, scrollbars are right side, resize is right side, tabs extend/open to right and usually closed LIFO. I find I travel less distance across windows/Ubuntu/macos in general.
And yes I hate the Mac's left placement of window controlsnehich breaks my flow.
To me having the same thing on every display feels redundant. But that's probably just me, because my brother has the same setup as what you described.
https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-28mq780-b
This is due primarily to hating having tons of horizontal and very little vertical… which just seems stupid for the content we all deal with most of the time. If you’re the average person, you cruise Facebook half the day and use Google Docs for the other half (I’m exaggerating, but you get it) and in either of those your vertical space is at a premium. The browser’s chrome eats space, then you have the site’s controls eating space, and then you have the OS’s crap eating space, and you get the remainder for your actual content. Infuriating.
This design means maximum screen real estate for apps, with dock features available when I need them.
I still prefer tiled windows (particularly herbstluftwm and PaperWM), but as far as floating window setups go it feels about as well-designed as it gets.
> For a long time, the looks of macOS, and therefore the looks of elementary OS fascinated me. I found the dock elegant and the black bar at the top a needed bad.
> At least until I realized how wasteful this desktop paradigm is, as most of our screens, including TVs, laptop screens, and computer displays are horizontally wide.
Surely he knows that the dock can trivially be set to be vertical, right? Right?
> The top panel in macOS makes at least some sense due to their well-implemented global menu system. But what about applications that do not have menus? In that case, the top panel is just in the way of content.
Almost all applications of consequence have menus in MacOS. I guess a few /Applications/Utilities programs maybe...
Then forget about the Dock and use Spotlight, I launch whatever I need in less than a second.
On the Air I only use max-size windows & on the Pro I use tiles and panes.
defaults write com.apple.dock tilesize -integer 1; killall Dock. defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -int 0
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -int 0
killall Dock S C R E E N T H R E E
screen one screen two
That is:
screen one LEFT-OF screen two
screen one BELOW screen three
screen two BELOW screen three
As the menu, that's not surprising at all. After acquiring NeXT, Apple's job was to convert it into something palatable to Mac users, and which could also accommodate both converted Mac apps (via Carbon) and legacy apps (via Classic). And they had to move fast and decisively: the company's future depended on it. This absolutely required a horizontal menu bar.
NeXT's menu system wasn't all that great anyway: it was hard to hit. Fitt's law really is a thing. I loved the tearoff menus though.