Resizing windows on macOS Tahoe ā the saga continues
Since the first taste of Linux WMs, I believe the best and only good way of handling window move and resize is super+lmb/rmb respectively. No more pixel-perfect header/corner sniping!
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/qv0vmz/missing_supe...
It really has gotten to the point where Linux offers the best option for a sane desktop experience. Watching Windows and macOS implode while KDE and Gnome slowly get better and better has really been something. Not quite at the point I'd recommend them for grandma and grandpa, but not that far off, either.
>In total the thickness went down from 7 to 6 pixels, which is a 14% decrease, making it 14% more likely to miss it.
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).
Screens are getting bigger and bigger, yet they make things smaller and harder to click on.
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...
The interesting part, for anyone who actually reads the article - the change was fixed in an RC and then reverted in the final release.
Which implies there was some regression, some issue, some incorrect behavior or negative impact. One has to wonderā¦ what could it have been? What could the issue with having a more accurate clickbox for the corner of the window possibly be?
The updates shipped by apple introducing more bugs every cycle. It is across the board, macos, ios and ipad os. The fact there is a group inside apple, that is capable of standing against common sense and users best interest for so long, tells how wrong things are internally.
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.
What astounds me the most about this whole thing is that the sort of hit testing involved here is a solved problem in UI, and has been for decades, yet there are still plenty of others here and elsewhere arguing about how it isn't. Even with those horrid rounded corners it's not hard, as shown in the article, which makes me wonder whether there is some internal fight between those who didn't want rounded corners (developers?) and hence tried their hardest to make it buggier, and those who wanted them (designers?), with lots of back-and-forth that eventually gave us this outcome. A disturbing amount of time and $$$ was probably spent on it, as is usual for any bureaucracy.
Since we talk resizing windows, for months I was _sometimes_ unable to resize windows at all, and couldn't figure out why. I thought it was a random bug of macOS.
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!)
It turns out the reason they reverted is likely regressions as noted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46999858
This is exactly the type of issue Steve Jobs would notice and then you're fired. The UI is the main event. If you can't get it right you don't work on it ever again.
I have a guess as to why this fix was delayedāon the release candidate, you weren't able to resize windows in Stickies. I filed a bug for it. This felt like a last-minute additionāthe previous betas didn't have the 'fix.'
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.
Iāve so far resisted using HN for tech support, but Iāll jump on the macOS hate bandwagon. My MBP M1 Max with 32 GB RAM has become near-unusable with Tahoe. Trying to switch users? Frozen. Click on something? Beachballs. Thereās visible stutter and hangs in the lock screen animations. I hate it so much.
It's bad when stock Gnome is better. That's where I am now.
Iāve tried many apps for window resizing on Mac, and none feel like theyāre nearly as good as FancyZones (the PowerToys module for Windows). I donāt want secret squirrel key combos. I donāt want hot corners.
I want two things:
- Predefined zones Ć la FancyZones - Tied edges (thereās 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!
I switched from macOS to Linux ten years ago and haven't looked back. At the time, I compared Linux vs. macOS to living at home vs. in a hotel [1]. Since then, I feel things have only gotten better for Linux, and more restrictive and arcane on macOS.
How Apple allowed itself to get into this mess is a fascinating and not investigated enough question, IMO.
Same for Intel.
What is it that lets companies which are leaders in a particular field for decades suddenly unable to do the basics.
The other incredibly annoying glitch in here, is that the resize cursor is only shown for foreground windows - but background windows are still resizable (despite the missing cursor) if you happen to drag their edges...
I know this is overkill for almost everyone but for those interested in a tiling window manager, take a look at AeroSpace [0].
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.
I have never vibed with macOS's seemingly default mode of floating windows layered over one another like scattered paper on a desk (mimicking a desktop I suppose). Instead ive been using https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace for the past couple of years and just flicking around via hotkeys. Not perfect but much less friction for my use cases
Iām a Windows guy, but was given a MacBook for my current job. Fair enough. But I laugh at how horrendous such a simple thing as resizing windows is. Want Slack to take up the right third of a screen then fill the rest with browser? In Windows, it takes 2 seconds. Not on Mac. I have to resize the window myself? Thereās no auto-snap?
Iām sure someone will buzz in with some hidden way to do it. āHold cmd-shft-9 then say these magic words and voila!ā No. Dragging the window with the cursor should suffice.
Edit: Iāll 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.
You have to wonder whatās actually going on under the hood when the curve of the hitbox is different to the curve of the window? Iām very curious to understand how Apple have got to this point.
It's amazing how much effort is wasted adding various OS degradation features (like poorly readable redesign) while bread & butter basics are broken for decades (it's a bad primitive to require pixel-perfect precision for resizing) and even get worse following those design gimmicks like rounded corners
(and, of course, custom radii would've helped, but users can't have such powers, Apple knows best)
Makes my recent decision to ditch osx for Linux with a tiling wm seem all the more fitting
MacOS has severely deteriorated over time. It's handling of windows in general, on multiple screens particularly and new windows and even dialogs opening _behind_ the active application is awesome.
Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave.
So I was thinking 26.3 will be me "my" version of Tahoe. But I'll just leave Tahoe out completly.
This is a perfect example of why I use raycast & their window management shortcuts: alm - Almost Maximise window tf - Toggle Full-screen lh - Left Half rh - Right Half
I donāt think the problem is resolvable to everyoneās satisfaction, which speaks to the poor decision to make the windows that shape in the first place.
So, there's still no option to adjust the corner radius?
You think this is bad? Try using Apple Music with a traditional mouse. You canāt even right click on half of the interface, dragging elements near to scrollable edges doesnāt trigger any scroll, and UI elements like the star on favourited songs just donāt show up. Itās marginally better on a trackpad.
Resizing windows is easier when you don't have to grab the corner. Some people are talking about holding a key to resize on Linux but I don't want to be forced to use the keyboard.
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.
What drives me nuts is if I slam my cursor against the right side of the window with the intent to click and drag the scroll bar of a maximized window up and down then the 1px wide window border gets selected and the whole window moves up and down. This has been a bug for several years.
> In total the thickness went down from 7 to 6 pixels, which is a 14% decrease, making it 14% more likely to miss it.
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.
Doesn't the cursor change into a pair of <-> arrows when you hover over the clickable area?
Easy Move+Resize and Carry On
As thrilled as I was when seeing the first round window on X11's xeyes, it is not a good use of developers' time and compute resources to deal with rounded corners.
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 miss resizing windows with alt+right click
This is why I swear by Rectangle. Lots of options for snapping them and keeping windows nice and organized.
Trying to get Liquid Glass to work is such a clown show. Incredible.
The UI wasnāt perfect before. Itās slowly been getting worse with each of their dumb updates to make it look more like iOS over the years.
What weāre forced to use now is just a joke. Ignoring all the visual design issues they canāt even make basic stuff fully functional.
i encourage everyone here to try a tiling window manager like i3/sway on Linux to experience a snappy way to manage window (sizes).
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.
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This is a design flub which we are told Jobs simply wouldn't have let out the door. The Jobs who made people shave 50ms off boot times. The Jobs who demanded the no button mouse.
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.
Even without the rounded corners it was more difficult than it needed to be. The corner resize should take up way more of the sides of the window. If my mouse is 90% of the way to the corner, what are the odds that I want to resize the window only horizontally or vertically?
Tahoe is the most frustrating daily driver I've endured in decades.
Oh, this is probably related to why I cannot resize "live caption" windows at all on the latest version of MacOS. They have been mucking around with resizing and not testing it well.
The Apple hiring process maybe needs even more tests to find an engineer who can just fix this sensibly. That must be it.
Half the time my Mac doesn't show the resize cursor when in regions where it works to resize windows. It's annoying. But not quite the same issue as seen here.
it isnt perfect, but with BetterTouchTool you can toggle resizing -- e.g. three finger double tap on a trackpad, move your cursor around to resize, double tap again to exit the mode.
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.
well this certainly goes a long way to explaining why i've been fighting with window resize on tahoe :p
it's stupidly difficult to grab windows by the flat edges, too
It is quite possible the proposed improvement was not implemented because it wasnāt good enough. Fingers crossed for the next version.
Why doesnt apple just hire this guy and fix this?
I used it for like 5 minutes the other day after install and immediately noticed something was off; thanks!
I bet some manager came up with a perfectly reasonable explanation why it couldnāt be done in this release ))
Try moving the spotlight search box. I swear you have to use tweezers to find the razor thing edge.
Let's just go back to Macintosh OS 9 ... I LOVED OS 9!
I used it for 2 minutes the other day after the install and immediately noticed this wth
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I cannot believe we do not have a good arm Linux laptop with a comparable price and battery to a MacBook at this stage.
I am forced to use this abomination of an operating system just because.
Come on Lenovo, make it happen
What the hell is going on at Apple?
Where are the engineers allocated to?
Who's driving the bus? Cause it sure ain't Siri either.
I wish all OSes just came with a reasonable TWM.
Rectangle Pro for the win
Can't you just submit a PR?
Microsoft Windows has a similar issue. I wonder why nobody is talking about that on HN.
I don't know what all this fuss is around. I'm not a fanboy and I just use my macbook as a tool.. and the resizing works fine. Is it maybe a mouse thing? I use the touchpad
Were the wrong graphics used in the two examples shown? I overlayed them in Paint (yeah that's right Windows), and aside from the numbers in the top left they appear identical.
* Nevermind... Firefox wasn't showing the animation on the first one so all I was seeing was the first frame.
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For XFCE users, the old themes still work:
xfwm4-themes-4.10.0.tar
macos went from quirky-functional to performative-dysfunctional in line with society
Hyprland
What the....
This is such poor execution on Apple's part.
Just fucking revert the UI at this point. It's a disaster on macOS.
I want a macbook for the insane efficiency of the M5 CPU but I hate the mac GUI.
This is the Apple quality that the premium price is so good to pay for, really how hard must one be into Apple cult.
KDE window management is current peak.
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.
> And in fact, the release notes have also been updated: the problem went from a āResolved Issueā to a āKnown Issueā.
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.
How is it not pathetic that Apple can't fix this and bring it back to normal behavior? Who is fighting for this stupid behavior? It's driving me crazy as well.
Can you imagine the heavenly feeling of sociopathic project manager when they can ship feature that will mildly annoy millions of people?
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One way to fix this would be to decrease the corner radius again with the additional benefit of looking better and more efficient use of space /s
finally
Many moons ago, I invented* a rule that "you can always make people feel what you want about a #. either use percentages where they don't make sense, or whole numbers when a percentage does"
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 ā 0.097 mm ā 0.004"Haven't resized a window with a mouse since using aerospace
With Tahoe, I've been occasionally having this glitch that when I click on a icon, it doesn't bring back the window that's open... even after multiple clicks.