<story><title>Ask HN: Why does Apple refuse to add window snapping to macOS?</title><text>It’s honesty shocking that in 2023, MacOS still has a nonexistent window managing system. Forget us on the outside. How are the tens of thousands of employees who work for Apple not sending the executive team daily feedback on this?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>ralfd</author><text>My go to example to explain the One True Mac Way of Window management is the “The many windows of John Siracusa” podcast from ATP a few years ago.&lt;p&gt;The relevant discussion starts at 1:33:00&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;atp.fm&amp;#x2F;episodes&amp;#x2F;96&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;atp.fm&amp;#x2F;episodes&amp;#x2F;96&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Siracusa, who grew up as a (classic) Mac user, explains his tiling and overlapping habits to Arment and Liss, who grew up as Microsoft Windows users and later switched, and they gasp in utter horror, shock and awe.&lt;p&gt;For example Siracusa explains that he currently has a dozen terminal windows open, and also 19 overlapping Safari windows, normal for him, in BBEdit he regularly hits 20-40; they ask him if he doesn’t know about tabs and he replies “Oh, I love tabs! Of course every Window has many tabs!”. How would he manage&amp;#x2F;organize hundreds of tabs in multiple applications with a snapping tiling manager? He can’t. It is fun from there. Like, he jokes after a work week his desktop has “sedimentary layers”.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>donatj</author><text>Windows users who just maximize everything all the time and get giant empty white bars on the sides of their browser shock me. What an insane waste of space. You see windows users with Ultrawides and a maximized browser where the site is centered and 90% of the width of the screen is serving nothing but site border and it just makes me scream.&lt;p&gt;macOS replacing the “Zoom” stoplight buttons with “Full Screen” as the default behavior still irks me. Why would I ever want something full screen other than a video or game?</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Why does Apple refuse to add window snapping to macOS?</title><text>It’s honesty shocking that in 2023, MacOS still has a nonexistent window managing system. Forget us on the outside. How are the tens of thousands of employees who work for Apple not sending the executive team daily feedback on this?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>ralfd</author><text>My go to example to explain the One True Mac Way of Window management is the “The many windows of John Siracusa” podcast from ATP a few years ago.&lt;p&gt;The relevant discussion starts at 1:33:00&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;atp.fm&amp;#x2F;episodes&amp;#x2F;96&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;atp.fm&amp;#x2F;episodes&amp;#x2F;96&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Siracusa, who grew up as a (classic) Mac user, explains his tiling and overlapping habits to Arment and Liss, who grew up as Microsoft Windows users and later switched, and they gasp in utter horror, shock and awe.&lt;p&gt;For example Siracusa explains that he currently has a dozen terminal windows open, and also 19 overlapping Safari windows, normal for him, in BBEdit he regularly hits 20-40; they ask him if he doesn’t know about tabs and he replies “Oh, I love tabs! Of course every Window has many tabs!”. How would he manage&amp;#x2F;organize hundreds of tabs in multiple applications with a snapping tiling manager? He can’t. It is fun from there. Like, he jokes after a work week his desktop has “sedimentary layers”.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bentcorner</author><text>I recently started using MacOS and fell into this habit as well - I just end up leaving windows open floating underneath other apps.  I learned about cmd+` which is handy to deal with multiple windows of the same app.&lt;p&gt;In Windows I tend to minimize stuff I&amp;#x27;m not actively working on (but not always).  In general while I also have a lot of &amp;quot;background&amp;quot; windows it feels a lot less fiddly than MacOS.&lt;p&gt;Personally I don&amp;#x27;t like how &amp;quot;minimizing&amp;quot; apps on MacOS puts them in the temporary section of the launcher, I&amp;#x27;d rather they minimize back down to where the icon of the app normally lives.  I would end up with a bunch of black squares on the launcher in some random order with a tiny icon of each telling me which app this actually is.</text></comment>