https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/qv0vmz/missing_supe...
defaults write -g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture -bool true
The thing I miss the most from Sawfish is that it let me resize any window. There are a lot of fixed-sized modal dialogs with scrollbars that wouldn't need them if they were taller, and there's a lot of room on my portrait monitor!
I never resize a window with its border.
I never minimize a weindow.
I sometimes move a window to a different panel but it snaps to the width / height of the column.
Overlapping windows is perhaps the worst GUI paradigm - it's like the first thing someone thought of for 640 x 480 screens.
Let it go.
https://github.com/jmgao/metamove
it does exactly what you want coming from Fluxbox-style window managers
here’s how i configure it (it has a settings ui, this just automates setting it up) https://github.com/justjake/Dotfiles/blob/3d359f961b009478ef...
i didn’t notice the hideous corner grab areas for a few weeks after updating to 26 because i never tried to use the corner
The only annoyance is situations where you are moving the mouse while also starting to press a ctrl+ or cmd+ key combination and unexpectedly move or resize the window in the process.
I actually don't even know how to use the mac for the most part, I've learned to live in the terminal. I contrast this with Linux where I can just... idk, browse files? Where windows don't suddenly "escape" into some other, hidden environment, where I can just use a computer in a very sane way, and if I want keyboard shortcuts they largely align with expectations.
I was extremely frustrated while on a call using a mac. I made the video call full screen, which then placed it onto essentially a "virtual monitor" (ie: completely hidden). I had no way to alt tab back to it, for whatever reason, and I had no way to actually recover the window in any of the usualy "window switching" means. I knew there was a totally undiscoverable gesture to see those things but I was docked so didn't have access to the trackpad.
I figured out if you go to the hidden dock at the bottom and select Chrome, as I recall, you can then get swapped back over to that virtual desktop, "un full screen" the window, and it returns to sanity.
Mac UX seems to go against literally every single guideline I can imagine. Invisible corners, heavily reliant on gestures, asymmetric user experiences (ie: I can press a button to trigger something, but there isn't a way to 'un trigger' it using the same sequence/ reverse sequence/ 'shift' sequence), ridiculous failure modes, etc.
I can't believe that people live like this. I think they don't know how bad they've got it, I routinely see mac users avoiding the use of 'full screen', something that I myself have had to learn to avoid on a mac, despite decades of having never given it a second thought.
Linux is ready for prime time for anyone not bound to Windows/MacOS software.
Personally, I'm still on MacOS for work, but all my personal devices run some form of Linux. It's been liberating to say the least.
This somehow excluded Linux and its DEs, and I eagerly read any news, changelogs, and announcements in this space. They’re still not perfect in every aspect, but at least I see things improving instead of public turf wars between departments trying to improve their KPIs.
Why is there an extra URL handler for MS Edge that bypasses the default browser config? Why is the search bar this wide in the default taskbar config instead of showing a simple button? Why are local searches always sent to Bing with no easy way to switch it off or change the search provider?
> Not quite at the point I'd recommend them for grandma and grandpa, but not that far off, either.
But at this point grandma and grandpa are the only ones I'd recommend to use Apple devices.
It's speedy though.
These projects have been around for literally decades and really haven't changed much during that time. I think what you're noticing is that Linux desktops are as good as they always have been, but since Apple and Microsoft keep messing with theirs for marketing reasons, in comparison it seems that Linux GUIs are improving.
I've actually bought a Mac Mini which I use for media consumption and run it besides my Linux (Cachy OS) gaming PC. I have a jellyfin server, but the media client for linux is totally broken.
And, when you use an nvidia card, you really have to do a deep dive on which settings and which render client you want to run. I now have a stable solution that runs KDE Plasma via Wayland, that allows for games to run smoothly. It took me a while to figure that out.
The Linux community also, quite frankly, sucks. When you need to figure something out, you really need to make it a study and only if you know the correct jargon, you are deemed worthy of help. Othrwise you're bombarded with rtfm comments.
Tbh I have always found window management on Macs to be annoying and something to be avoided- Rectangle or something similar is one of the first things I install and try to use the shortcuts to just put windows in either a quarter or half of the screen.
That said, I use Macbooks for the hardware, if for whatever reason I had to switch to Linux I would just shrug and not care one bit. It took me a few years to realize, but MSFT just disappeared from my life one day and I didn't even notice.
Rather than evolutionary improvements we get Liquid Glass and ads in iWork applications. The enshittification has started I guess.
Speaking as a Tahoe user by the way who is not experiencing any issues to speak of (on 26.0.1 - and I can't reproduce the resizing inconsistency either). I've been using macOS since 2003 (back when it was called Mac OS X) and before that I was a Linux desktop user since 1996.
If your computer work is anything else, Macs are still decades ahead. With the highest quality software available for any task at cheap prices.
I can't work with a sub-par e-mail client, calendar, no good invoicing app, photo editing, etc.
And web apps do not cut it if working with these things is your job.
As for grandma and grandpa, iPad is their solution. With all the faults of the devices.
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).
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...
And despite things being smaller, there's also white space everywhere so there is less information on your screen.
The trend in UIs is making filenames into discrete icons instead of lists. In outlook this morning all I got 3 attachments and it's 3 icons that all are something almost identical like "<word icon>2026-02-13_A....docx" and I have to hover over them to figure out each filename. I don't get it.
I'm a Solidworks user. It's a 3D CAD program. From about 2012 to 2018, it was unusable with a display higher than 1080p because it did its own bad scaling of UI. Text elements would overlap and be cut off. Since then it works in general but to make 2D drawings I still change to 1080p. Making drawings involves a lot of clicking on lines and vertexes to add dimensions, but the hitboxes are 1 dimension thick, or even 1 single pixel. It's maddening at 4K. There are selection filters that help, but since it's sluggish in general in 4K I just admit defeat and use 1080p.
This probably has a lot to do with the vastly improved hardware design around then - the touchpad specifically on the “blackbook” Core 2 Duo era macbooks was a step change, and they keyboard was pretty great too. Multi-monitor support was fantastic compared to everything else too.
You have to wonder what the design principles of pre-X MacOS paired with modern Apple hardware could achieve.
Or we all go (back) to tiling window managers and get rid of all the resizing with the press of a key, or even no press.
Totally true. I have some some UX designers daily driving 4k monitors with 2k resolution to see things clearly!!
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?
For example: imagine you have 2 windows, the lower right corner of one window almost touching the upper right corner of the other, so that the bounding rectangles overlap but the graphics don't.
With the inaccurate "false square" corners, you just had to check the bounding rectangles, to know which window to resize, now you have to check the actual graphics (or more likely, a mask).
I am not saying it is the problem, but that's the kind of thing that can happen. Or it may be a simple bug, like a crash, memory corruption, an unhandled exception, the usual stuff, but they couldn't fix it in time and it is better to revert instead of leaving the buggy code or pushing an untested fix.
I'm more interested in how or why this bug was approved up be worked on so quickly after it was surfaced, rather than other longstanding and arguably more impactful bugs.
Ideally there should be some way to control the tapzone within CSS.
Last time I needed to fix the problem on a page I was responsible for it required adding an HTML element, which was far from ideal. I seem to recall I also had to explicitly add an onclick handler too (registering an onclick handler silently modifies touch behaviour on Safari - a nasty hidden side effect). There's some new badness with stealing taps in iOS26's Safari - ugggh.
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.
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!)
I get why Apple wants you to make every window either a small tile or a full screen application now, their window manager simply can't cope with anything else.
Whatever they're doing is somehow worse than both Windows and the major Linux desktop environments. Maybe there's some obscure preference among old school macOS users that like having their windows placed so that only a small corner pokes out of the bottom left when attaching an external monitor?
It's a bit scary to see that the software we rely on every day is such a complex behemoth that even a seemingly small change can have so large repercussions.
The problem is that AI only helps add even more complexity since it's so simple to just add more code now that we don't have to write it.
Except when it's a Qt application, which has no drop shadows because client-side decorations shenanigans.
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.
Well no, this group is your people and you're speaking to the choir.
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!
* https://www.hammerspoon.org/
* https://gist.github.com/joedrago/bfc54f4083b070fe998d519cc6c...
I use BentoBox on my MacBook and it is just as good as FancyZones on Windows. I think I paid 9 dollars, and I have it for life.
Same for Intel.
What is it that lets companies which are leaders in a particular field for decades suddenly unable to do the basics.
Apple's failure to improve the Mac seems pretty straightforward looking at their profit breakdowns. The Mac really is not ever their priority.
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.
For example, "open two file browsers, navigate to $home in one and $downloads in the other, move and rename a few files between them" is a 10 second task on Windows (Win+E x2, quick clicks on the explorer links, easy to scroll around, move files, drag, rename, anything you want). On Mac I get about 7 system ding sounds and Finder windows bugging off the side of my screen while simultaneously deciding the best way to show downloads in a list is alphabetically and with 256x256 tiled icons. It's just an indescribably bad and slow experience to do any kind of file management on Mac.
Another example. Take a screenshot and quickly redact some info with a black box. Easy on windows that I can type it out exactly (win+s, drag box, win key "paint" enter control v box tool save boom). On Mac?? After command shift 4 to take a screenshot I think it's actually physically impossible to edit it within 60 seconds.
Hovering over the green dot in the title bar will bring up some simple window tiling options.
https://support.apple.com/guide/macbook-air/manage-windows-o... has more to say on the subject, more recent versions of the OS than I use have added more stuff in this vein, personally I just use Moom and have been for years.
For those it works for, it works really well. For those who came from windows always being maximized or split into a grid, it’s a nightmare.
Pretty similar to differences in real world desk styles, actually.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-window-tilin...
With Windows you need to remove most of the cruft, Mac is no different; most people are using some combination of Raycast, Rectangle, Alfred, etc...
There is also this option you can enable to drag windows around when holding a shortcut: https://petar.dev/notes/drag-windows-on-macos/
The stuff with Objective-C and Swift is cool, but not enough to justify fully migrating into Apple land.
Press Control-Up Arrow (or swipe up with three or four fingers) to enter Mission Control, drag a window from Mission Control onto the thumbnail of the full-screen app in the Spaces bar, then click the Split View thumbnail. You can also drag an app thumbnail onto another in the Spaces bar.
I'm actually agreeing with you. You shouldn't have to resort to third party apps.
Install Rectangle or anything macOS Sequoia or newer and move on.
A tiling UI would have been much easier to implement! But the original Mac had overlapping windows with pixel-perfect drop shadows. It's a bit nuts when you think about it.
(and, of course, custom radii would've helped, but users can't have such powers, Apple knows best)
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 don't have to use your keyboard.
For example I never use my mouse's DPI button which is a little button next to the wheel mouse. You can remap that to whatever key you need to hold to resize a window and now you have a fully mouse driven solution for resizing.
Which seems like a sensible and convenient choice to me.
Maybe it isn't working so predictably for you?
But also a 14% higher chance that you won't hit it by accident.
This is not a situation where bigger is simply better. If the thickness was 50 pixels, that would make it pretty much impossible to not resize the windows. I am one of those who believe that there are still people at Apple who care deeply about user interfaces. Given the amount of attention paid to the regions for resizing by dragging the corner, I actually assume that they also took a second look a dragging the edges, and concluded that 6 pixels was better than 7.
I've used Linux as my daily OS for 20 years and got so used to alt-right resize and alt-left drag that the macOS and Windows way of actually needing to move my mouse to the corner or edge of a window feel almost barbaric in comparison.
I still have found no way free equivalent on macOS.
The UI wasn’t perfect before. It’s slowly been getting worse with each of their dumb updates to make it look more like iOS over the years.
What we’re forced to use now is just a joke. Ignoring all the visual design issues they can’t even make basic stuff fully functional.
No more dragging around windows or manually resizing them - just hotkeys. Took me a while to get used to it but can't live without it now.
The reduction of UX quality that goes along with the lesser space for grabbing a window's corner are unacceptable for me.
There are few recent innovations in UX, and many regressions. One thing that I appreciate is the "split window" in Chromium instead of adding yet another tab.
I get the cult of Steve is a bit oversold but the proprietor liked to check the finish on the car rolling out the end of the line and if his fingers felt a rough edge on a panel he had no compunction stopping the production line to find the problem. The current generation have a bit too much "fixed in post" going on.
on MacOS i will never not use something like rectangle, the out-of-the-box experience on MacOS has always been dogshit in my opinion, it just screams for a third-party software to do the heavy lifting.
* Nevermind... Firefox wasn't showing the animation on the first one so all I was seeing was the first frame.
xfwm4-themes-4.10.0.tar
it's stupidly difficult to grab windows by the flat edges, too
I use Yabai, which is pretty good -- and you don't have to completely disable SIP.
For moving windows around (floating if using Yabai), I just hold HYPER and move my cursor around (Start Moving Windows). Release HYPER and it stops.
I am forced to use this abomination of an operating system just because.
Come on Lenovo, make it happen
It would be nice though.
Where are the engineers allocated to?
Who's driving the bus? Cause it sure ain't Siri either.
I'm really baffeled the same mistakes and errors are being made over and over again in both Windows and macOS.
Just use KDE approach and it's done.
It's really disappointing that new OS versions are being marketed by a new look, which is not new at all, just rehashed look that was in use years ago but thrown away.
This is such poor execution on Apple's part.
So they finally admit that they are unable to solve a ridiculously trivial problem of their own making. This is a farce. Apple has managed to lose the last remnants of respect and good will on my part. And I cannot trust a platform that is so blatantly mismanaged.
I hear it when I read 7 px -> 6 px means 14%(!!!!) less likely to find the horizontal/vertical only drag area.
Fitts's Law is logarithmic, not linear, and at these sizes the dominant factor is whether the target is discoverable at all, not its sub-millimeter width. "14%" smuggles in precision that doesn't exist in the underlying motor reality; it takes an imperceptible physical change and launders it through a ratio with a small denominator to produce a number that feels alarming. You could just as honestly say "we moved the edge by 0.097 mm**" and nobody would blink.
* I think? It feels like there'd be prior art on this
**
ppi = 262
inch = 1/ppi
mm = inch \* 25.4
# 1px ≈ 0.097 mm ≈ 0.004"