Resizing windows on macOS Tahoe – 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...

>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).

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!)

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 wonder… what could it have been? What could the issue with having a more accurate clickbox for the corner of the window possibly be?

I’ve tried many apps for window resizing on Mac, and none feel like they’re nearly as good as FancyZones (the PowerToys module for Windows). I don’t want secret squirrel key combos. I don’t want hot corners.

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!

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?

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.

It's bad when stock Gnome is better. That's where I am now.

I’m 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? There’s no auto-snap?

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.

You have to wonder what’s actually going on under the hood when the curve of the hitbox is different to the curve of the window? I’m very curious to understand how Apple have got to this point.

I bet some manager came up with a perfectly reasonable explanation why it couldn’t be done in this release ))

Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave.

What the....

This is such poor execution on Apple's part.

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

I miss resizing windows with alt+right click

Doesn't the cursor change into a pair of <-> arrows when you hover over the clickable area?

It is quite possible the proposed improvement was not implemented because it wasn’t good enough. Fingers crossed for the next version.

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.

Why doesnt apple just hire this guy and fix this?

I want a macbook for the insane efficiency of the M5 CPU but I hate the mac GUI.

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

Rectangle Pro for the win

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.

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.

Trying to get Liquid Glass to work is such a clown show. Incredible.

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.

Haven't resized a window with a mouse since using aerospace

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.

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 ≈ 0.097 mm ≈ 0.004"