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> I still get frustrated on OSX when I minimize a window and have to hunt around for it Windows user here. Honest curiosity: does anyone know why the minimize

> I still get frustrated on OSX when I minimize a window and have to hunt around for it Windows user here. Honest curiosity: does anyone know why the minimize / maximize works on the Mac the way it does? I mean, what's the rationale to design it like this?

k__ 9y ago
I have no idea... I'm came from ~18 of Windows & Linux usage and everyone always told me macOS is THE OS with the best usability. But I can't confirm this. Minimization of windows is shitty and maximization even more. When I maximize, often just the height is changed, when I go back to "normal" the height and the width is changed, so I always have to adjust the width manually. When I minimize a few windows, it's impossible to get back the right one without luck.
- analogic 9y ago
  After using a mac for ~6 months now, I finally understand what happened to gnome3/unity, clearly designed by mac users. I mean it's perfectly usable once I got the basic gestures down and installed the app that let me independently set the track pad and mouse wheel scroll directions, but will go so far as to say that both xfce and MATE are objectively better at window management. Partly I think their hands were tied by the too late to change decision for the always there contextual top menu bar. Or this is just 25 years of using win95 clones talking and I'm set in my ways.
  - herbst 9y ago
    I wouldnt say Gnome is by or for mac users. In fact in many ways it is way more similiar to Metro than to OSX. Gnome 3 just broke the common Windows 95 workflow, however many others did before.
    - analogic 9y ago
      ya tbh i never tried using it for more than 10 minutes
      - herbst 9y ago
        Personally i love it but it took me way more than 10 minutes to realize why :) IMO it is highly underestimated, mostly because you need to change your workflow which takes time, but when you did it feels super productive. You wouldnt judge i3 or other completely different approaches after only a few minutes.
        NoGravitas 9y ago
        I feel absolutely the same about Gnome 3. One of the biggest things, I think, is that it puts workspaces absolutely in your face, so using them is a much more natural part of the workflow than in Gnome 2. It's also more keyboard-friendly than Gnome 2 (though it still could use some work in this area). Despite being rather large (gnome-shell on Wayland is typically the second-biggest RAM user on my laptop), it feels minimalistic, and is almost always fast, and stays out of the way of whatever I'm working on.
        herbst 9y ago
        > it feels minimalistic, and is almost always fast, and stays out of the way of whatever I'm working on. absolutely :) What i like the most is you are just a super key tab away from basically everything so focus on a single thing feels natural and right. There is no way to lose anything either, its all there. Always.
        dm319 9y ago
        I'm going to have to give it another go then, though I do love my MATE desktop. The last time I tried it, I got frustrated when working with a lot of pdf sources - hitting the super key just presented me with a myriad of white rectangles where open windows would frequently rearrange requiring a slow manual search to find the file I was looking for. This can be less of a problem with a taskbar, as the filename is the main identifier, and being 1 dimensional it is easier to scan and preserves its position better.
- _mrmnmly 9y ago
  Know what you're talking about. Since I've switched back to Linux I can't imagine working without workspaces - each one dedicated for specific task/app - and every time staying with specific order so e.g. 1 workspace: Browser, 2nd: Code editor, 3rd: Terminal, 4th: File explorers etc. I used to it so much that I automatically use shortcuts to access it immediately - switching between minimized windows using alt + tab keys is a nightmare.
  - dm319 9y ago
    Yes, this is something I do to on linux, and it's great particularly when you're doing something that gets quite messy with lots of windows open - when you're working with lots of files, or you the program (like GIMP) opens up several windows. If you need to do something else it's so nice to just leave it all and move onto a nice clean workspace without having to minimize everything.
    - lou1306 9y ago
      You do have multiple workspaces on Windows 10... Though if you mean "automatically assign application X to workspace Y", which many Linux WMs are able to do, you're out of luck.
      - digi_owl 9y ago
        Sadly the workspaces are very much mouse oriented (want to switch between workspaces? Thats win+ctrl+number!). And there is no proper UI element for checking if you have anything open in a different workspace without opening the switcher.
        jhasse 9y ago
        You can switch with Ctrl+Win+Left/Right, too.
        digi_owl 9y ago
        While true, it does not alleviate the finger yoga...
- jasim 9y ago
  I use ShiftIt (https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt), and ctrl+alt+cmd+M maximizes the window just like you expect.
- mwaitjmp 9y ago
  What's strange on a mac is somehow having the ability to completely lose windows. Another frustration is trying to view two apps together on the screen at the same time, if one of the apps itself contains multiple windows. I'm not at my desk to try this but let's say you have multiple chrome windows open, all with their own tabs, and you want to view your current chrome window overlayed on a window from another app. To do this you have to manually minimise all of your chrome windows one by one so they will all move of the way, to allow you to switch between apps and view them both at the same time.
  - k__ 9y ago
    Always have this issue with Xcode. Somehow it is able to open up the device manager and THEN give the window in the background focus when I switch to my editor and back to Xcode with cmd+tab. So I have to move the Xcode window down, to grab that backgrund thing what seems to be part of Xcode.
  - joeframbach 9y ago
    Here's my workflow for this situation. Four fingers up, expose. Drag the windows you need up top into a new desktop. Command (or control? Or option? Or a combination?) Plus the right arrow to switch desktops. Try all the combinations until I get to the right desktop or throw the damn thing out a window.
russellbeattie 9y ago
No idea... And a few versions ago Apple changed the maximize button to go full screen, which made it useless for the 95% of us who don't use one app at a time. Minimized windows also used to show up at the bottom of the screen when using "Expose", but then Apple changed the name to "Mission Control" and removed them. Just one more example of them slowly but surely driving its Mac customers away.
- Angostura 9y ago
  use alt-click on the green button.
- leadingthenet 9y ago
  > which made it useless for the 95% of us who don't use one app at a time I'm actually willing to bet good money that it's the other way around and it's you who is in the minority.
  - chrisper 9y ago
    You sure you are not confusing it with iOS? That's where you always have strictly only one app in fullscreen! (Yes, yes. It is a lame joke. But who uses only one Window at a time? What is the point of that? Though I remember when I used OS X you could swipe left (or right) to switch back to all other apps. So I think that was good enough.)
    - williamdclt 9y ago
      I use several windows at a time (around 5 in average), but they are all maximized. I just alt-tab and switch workspaces?
      - chrisper 9y ago
        But when it is full screen then you can't alt tab, right? You would have to use the shortcut to switch workspaces. Maybe I just remember wrong.
frou_dh 9y ago
macOS has Hide & HideOthers in addition to Minimize. I go weeks at a time without using minimize because of those. IMO there's a whole generation of people who did their early computing on MS Windows (including myself) and so internalised that that is how GUIs are "supposed to work". When moving to something else later in life there's a feeling that it is "wrong", but it (e.g macOS)'s way of doing things is also correct and is just a divergent evolution to MS Windows. Research, open-mindedness and experimentation are necessary when using something different.
- gurkendoktor 9y ago
  And this hidden setting makes working with Hide/Hide Others much more intuitive: http://osxdaily.com/2010/06/22/make-hidden-application-icons-translucent-in-the-dock/ http://osxdaily.com/2010/06/22/make-hidden-application-icons...
  - jentulman 9y ago
    Thanks for that one.
  - fredsted 9y ago
    Doesn't seem to work on High Sierra.
    - gurkendoktor 9y ago
      I'm on High Sierra and it works, maybe just needs a `killall Dock` to have an effect.
- triplesec 9y ago
  I'm new to macOS. Thank you. I need these tips. It's really annoying in the differences, but I'm sure thre are more hidden things that are useful I suspect I am not alone
morsch 9y ago
Classic Mac OS (System 7 was contemporary to Windows 95) didn't really have any concept of minimisation or even maximization as such. There was no task bar or dock or anything else really to minimise to. IIRC there were addons for 7.1 that added "window shading": a button on the window title bar that reduces the window to just the title bar.[1] The closest thing to a maximise button in classic Mac OS was more like a size-to-fit button: the application gave the window manager a hint which was the appropriate size for the document displayed, be it a file folder, a word processor document or whatever. Having a single window fill the entire screen wasn't as common as it was on Windows. None of this was particularly strange to me back then. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowShade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowShade apparently a standard feature later on
- zeveb 9y ago
  > Having a single window fill the entire screen wasn't as common as it was on Windows. Yup! For the longest time I liked to work with a half-width browser window to match my half-width editor & word processor windows. It drove me crazy the number of websites which set their body text to some fraction of the window width, which looked good with a fullscreen window but terrible with a halfscreen one. Eventually I just gave up. The whole point of the web was device-independent information transfer, but somehow we allowed device-dependence to sneak it.
- saratogacx 9y ago
  MacOS System 7 did have a function like minimize for Apps (not individual windows). In the finder menu on the upper right, you could "hide" or "show" a program and use the same menu to switch apps, similar to the task bar in Win95. You can play around with it on archive.org. https://archive.org/details/mac_MacOS_7.0.1_compilation https://archive.org/details/mac_MacOS_7.0.1_compilation
- jaclaz 9y ago
  >Classic Mac OS (System 7 was contemporary to Windows 95)... System 7 was WAY earlier than Windows 95, it was 1991, a little more than 4 years earler (like an eternity): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7 "It was introduced on May 13, 1991 ..." And even 7.1 was almost exactly 3 years earlier: System 7.1 "In August 1992, the 7.1 update was released." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95 "It was released on August 24, 1995" Not even Windows 3.1 had been released at the time System 7 came out, it's competitor on MS side was DOS (version 5.00): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_DOS_operating_systems#1980–1995:_Important_events_in_DOS_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_DOS_operating_syst... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1x https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1x or some of the various semi-graphical third party shells for DOS.
hunvreus 9y ago
It drove me nuts when they updated the maximize button behavior to full screen. I use ShiftIt, a neat little Open Source tool that help me manage windows sizes and positions (including minimizing and maximizing): https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt I've recommend it to pretty much any Mac user I've met.
- Angostura 9y ago
  Alternatively, use opt-click to just invoke the old-style maximise. No add-on needed.
  - fredsted 9y ago
    Double-clicking on empty window chrome also works.
- epicide 9y ago
  Haven't used ShiftIt, but I've been using Spectacle to accomplish the same thing. They seem pretty similar, overall. Works pretty well and I've had no issues.
  - lloydde 9y ago
    I used Spectacle for years than was forced to switch to ShiftIt at a new employer. ShiftIt default hotkey combos didn’t conflict with other apps like Spectacle.
yoz-y 9y ago
For minimize I can't say. But the maximize works the way it works because (and this is according to the platform ideology, not some general truth) you are not supposed to maximize windows in the Windows sense of the word. The macOS interface is based around floating and overlapping windows. If you put a window over the whole screen then it could be as well maximized. This gets a bit hairy on smaller screens but really shines on huge monitors. In general macOS is more optimized around having one big screen rather than a multi-monitor setup.
- ksk 9y ago
  What was the big screen they optimized for in 1984?
  - yoz-y 9y ago
    I do not know how the interface looked back then (I was not even born), but I can imagine that at that time a lot in interface design had yet to be discovered.
Angostura 9y ago
The old maximise system was simply designed to make the window as large as it needed to be to optimally fit content. It wasn't designed to 'make this window fit the screen'. It was designed to 'make this window fit this A4 document.
- kk_cz 9y ago
  Thanks, this is the first answer to this question that sort of makes sense from a Windows user point of view. I mean I still prefer the "Windows way", but this is at least viable reasoning for the "Mac way".
mmphosis 9y ago
Different ways of working, mostly stuck in our own ways of doing things. I rarely, if ever, use Minimize on the Mac. Minimize comes from Windows (and other windowing systems) where the window minimizes to an icon or button on the task bar. "Maximize" also comes from Windows (and other windowing systems.) As others have noted, in newer macos (which I don't use,) I think it oddly makes the window go full screen. Full screen is a recent macos feature -- I once asked about making my Application go full screen and Apple developer support said that going full screen did not follow their Human Interface guidelines. Something seems to have changed at Apple since I asked about that decades ago. There was no Maximize on the Mac, it is called "Zoom." The idea is that the window has two sizes and you zoom between the two sizes: One size is the size the user has resized the window to (often with much difficulty) and the other size is an ideal compact size ("optimally fit content") without hiding anything and hopefully where scroll bars do not appear -- it is a UI feature that is/was rarely, if ever, done very well by applications other than the Finder. By the way, Command-Tab to switch tasks was once an add-on from Microsoft for Mac OS. Go Microsoft! (Mac fanboy here :)
- _jal 9y ago
  All correct. In daily use, I almost never use those buttons - I end up manually sizing/placing windows. The the MacOS scheme of doing this leads a sort of organic, emergent window layout - I always end up with windows staggered to display relevant bits. With Windows (and with most window managers, X), things always end up either strict tiled or stacked. I'm very used to the Mac way and prefer it, but that could just be the result of long use. It doesn't waste space (Windows apps always seem to have lots of dead space to me and makes me work to be able to see parts of other windows) and forces me to switch windows far less. But it is a fiarly subtle thing.
  - nine_k 9y ago
    The amount of tedious manual work required to resize and arrange several windows on MacOS (6+ to latest OSX) bothered me all the time I had a misfortune to have to use it. It does not even have something like edge snapping. My WM of choice is now Xfwm, which allows to rearrange windows easily without gaps, make windows fill available space (vertical and horizontal separately), or tile them by dragging to corners. On OSX, things like Spectacle and Magnet sort of help.
fredsted 9y ago
Depending on how you've configured your Dock, Minimize is pretty simple. Either the window just moves to the Dock, or it minimizes into the application icon (then you can right-click on the Dock icon to view a list of the windows that are minimized, or click to open the last minimized window) Maximize on Mac was NOT designed for the window to fill the whole screen, but rather to resize the window to optimally display its contents. E.g. maximizing a Preview window with a PDF document changes the width of the window to the PDF page width. (Good tip for getting along with your Mac: stop trying to maximize everything.) In a recent macOS version, Apple changed the green "maximize" button to full-screen, which is very different from maximize. Now double-clicking on most window chromes will execute the old maximize behavior.
- astrocat 9y ago
  > Maximize on Mac was NOT designed for the window to fill the whole screen, but rather to resize the window to optimally display its contents. The problem with this approach is I definitely do not need someone else making the decision of what is "optimal" for me. I've been using macOS for about as long as I used to use Windows now, and at this point, macOS seems to have largely abandoned the concept, which is great. Applications get either a full screen in their own isolated context, or option-click for a full-screen in a regular windowed context. The options now are a very windows-95/98 like: "either go completely full screen, or resize to whatever you like," which gives me full control of what I find optimal for any given application.
  - dahauns 9y ago
    >The problem with this approach is I definitely do not need someone else making the decision of what is "optimal" for me. And that's the crux. The whole feature (in its original incarnation) rested on the false assumption that there's a singular "optimal" state at any given time. The Apple Human Interface Guidelines have been a state-of-the-art reference for good UI for a long time, but the part about the zoom button always baffled me, as it directly contradicted several Core Principles laid out in Part I of the book.
  - fredsted 9y ago
smpetrey 9y ago
Isn't the maximize button a full-screen mode now?
mr_toad 9y ago
You’re holding it wrong. But seriously, minimising windows is a reflex learnt from Windows. In Windows you often need to minimise one thing to find something else. Especially the desktop. On a Mac you can usually find something more quickly in the dock. In Windows you’re far more likely to have an app maximised by default, and minimising is a natural way to switch tasks. On a Mac, minimising is not a natural way of task switching.

k__ 9y ago

I have no idea... I'm came from ~18 of Windows & Linux usage and everyone always told me macOS is THE OS with the best usability. But I can't confirm this. Minimization of windows is shitty and maximization even more. When I maximize, often just the height is changed, when I go back to "normal" the height and the width is changed, so I always have to adjust the width manually. When I minimize a few windows, it's impossible to get back the right one without luck.

analogic 9y ago
After using a mac for ~6 months now, I finally understand what happened to gnome3/unity, clearly designed by mac users. I mean it's perfectly usable once I got the basic gestures down and installed the app that let me independently set the track pad and mouse wheel scroll directions, but will go so far as to say that both xfce and MATE are objectively better at window management. Partly I think their hands were tied by the too late to change decision for the always there contextual top menu bar. Or this is just 25 years of using win95 clones talking and I'm set in my ways.
- herbst 9y ago
  I wouldnt say Gnome is by or for mac users. In fact in many ways it is way more similiar to Metro than to OSX. Gnome 3 just broke the common Windows 95 workflow, however many others did before.
  - analogic 9y ago
    ya tbh i never tried using it for more than 10 minutes
    - herbst 9y ago
      Personally i love it but it took me way more than 10 minutes to realize why :) IMO it is highly underestimated, mostly because you need to change your workflow which takes time, but when you did it feels super productive. You wouldnt judge i3 or other completely different approaches after only a few minutes.
      - NoGravitas 9y ago
        I feel absolutely the same about Gnome 3. One of the biggest things, I think, is that it puts workspaces absolutely in your face, so using them is a much more natural part of the workflow than in Gnome 2. It's also more keyboard-friendly than Gnome 2 (though it still could use some work in this area). Despite being rather large (gnome-shell on Wayland is typically the second-biggest RAM user on my laptop), it feels minimalistic, and is almost always fast, and stays out of the way of whatever I'm working on.
        herbst 9y ago
        > it feels minimalistic, and is almost always fast, and stays out of the way of whatever I'm working on. absolutely :) What i like the most is you are just a super key tab away from basically everything so focus on a single thing feels natural and right. There is no way to lose anything either, its all there. Always.
        dm319 9y ago
        I'm going to have to give it another go then, though I do love my MATE desktop. The last time I tried it, I got frustrated when working with a lot of pdf sources - hitting the super key just presented me with a myriad of white rectangles where open windows would frequently rearrange requiring a slow manual search to find the file I was looking for. This can be less of a problem with a taskbar, as the filename is the main identifier, and being 1 dimensional it is easier to scan and preserves its position better.
_mrmnmly 9y ago
Know what you're talking about. Since I've switched back to Linux I can't imagine working without workspaces - each one dedicated for specific task/app - and every time staying with specific order so e.g. 1 workspace: Browser, 2nd: Code editor, 3rd: Terminal, 4th: File explorers etc. I used to it so much that I automatically use shortcuts to access it immediately - switching between minimized windows using alt + tab keys is a nightmare.
- dm319 9y ago
  Yes, this is something I do to on linux, and it's great particularly when you're doing something that gets quite messy with lots of windows open - when you're working with lots of files, or you the program (like GIMP) opens up several windows. If you need to do something else it's so nice to just leave it all and move onto a nice clean workspace without having to minimize everything.
  - lou1306 9y ago
    You do have multiple workspaces on Windows 10... Though if you mean "automatically assign application X to workspace Y", which many Linux WMs are able to do, you're out of luck.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      Sadly the workspaces are very much mouse oriented (want to switch between workspaces? Thats win+ctrl+number!). And there is no proper UI element for checking if you have anything open in a different workspace without opening the switcher.
      - jhasse 9y ago
        You can switch with Ctrl+Win+Left/Right, too.
        digi_owl 9y ago
        While true, it does not alleviate the finger yoga...
jasim 9y ago
I use ShiftIt (https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt), and ctrl+alt+cmd+M maximizes the window just like you expect.
mwaitjmp 9y ago
What's strange on a mac is somehow having the ability to completely lose windows. Another frustration is trying to view two apps together on the screen at the same time, if one of the apps itself contains multiple windows. I'm not at my desk to try this but let's say you have multiple chrome windows open, all with their own tabs, and you want to view your current chrome window overlayed on a window from another app. To do this you have to manually minimise all of your chrome windows one by one so they will all move of the way, to allow you to switch between apps and view them both at the same time.
- k__ 9y ago
  Always have this issue with Xcode. Somehow it is able to open up the device manager and THEN give the window in the background focus when I switch to my editor and back to Xcode with cmd+tab. So I have to move the Xcode window down, to grab that backgrund thing what seems to be part of Xcode.
- joeframbach 9y ago
  Here's my workflow for this situation. Four fingers up, expose. Drag the windows you need up top into a new desktop. Command (or control? Or option? Or a combination?) Plus the right arrow to switch desktops. Try all the combinations until I get to the right desktop or throw the damn thing out a window.

russellbeattie 9y ago

No idea... And a few versions ago Apple changed the maximize button to go full screen, which made it useless for the 95% of us who don't use one app at a time. Minimized windows also used to show up at the bottom of the screen when using "Expose", but then Apple changed the name to "Mission Control" and removed them. Just one more example of them slowly but surely driving its Mac customers away.

Angostura 9y ago
use alt-click on the green button.
leadingthenet 9y ago
> which made it useless for the 95% of us who don't use one app at a time I'm actually willing to bet good money that it's the other way around and it's you who is in the minority.
- chrisper 9y ago
  You sure you are not confusing it with iOS? That's where you always have strictly only one app in fullscreen! (Yes, yes. It is a lame joke. But who uses only one Window at a time? What is the point of that? Though I remember when I used OS X you could swipe left (or right) to switch back to all other apps. So I think that was good enough.)
  - williamdclt 9y ago
    I use several windows at a time (around 5 in average), but they are all maximized. I just alt-tab and switch workspaces?
    - chrisper 9y ago
      But when it is full screen then you can't alt tab, right? You would have to use the shortcut to switch workspaces. Maybe I just remember wrong.

frou_dh 9y ago

macOS has Hide & HideOthers in addition to Minimize. I go weeks at a time without using minimize because of those. IMO there's a whole generation of people who did their early computing on MS Windows (including myself) and so internalised that that is how GUIs are "supposed to work". When moving to something else later in life there's a feeling that it is "wrong", but it (e.g macOS)'s way of doing things is also correct and is just a divergent evolution to MS Windows. Research, open-mindedness and experimentation are necessary when using something different.

gurkendoktor 9y ago
And this hidden setting makes working with Hide/Hide Others much more intuitive: http://osxdaily.com/2010/06/22/make-hidden-application-icons-translucent-in-the-dock/ http://osxdaily.com/2010/06/22/make-hidden-application-icons...
- jentulman 9y ago
  Thanks for that one.
- fredsted 9y ago
  Doesn't seem to work on High Sierra.
  - gurkendoktor 9y ago
    I'm on High Sierra and it works, maybe just needs a `killall Dock` to have an effect.
triplesec 9y ago
I'm new to macOS. Thank you. I need these tips. It's really annoying in the differences, but I'm sure thre are more hidden things that are useful I suspect I am not alone

morsch 9y ago

Classic Mac OS (System 7 was contemporary to Windows 95) didn't really have any concept of minimisation or even maximization as such. There was no task bar or dock or anything else really to minimise to. IIRC there were addons for 7.1 that added "window shading": a button on the window title bar that reduces the window to just the title bar.[1] The closest thing to a maximise button in classic Mac OS was more like a size-to-fit button: the application gave the window manager a hint which was the appropriate size for the document displayed, be it a file folder, a word processor document or whatever. Having a single window fill the entire screen wasn't as common as it was on Windows. None of this was particularly strange to me back then. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowShade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowShade apparently a standard feature later on

zeveb 9y ago
> Having a single window fill the entire screen wasn't as common as it was on Windows. Yup! For the longest time I liked to work with a half-width browser window to match my half-width editor & word processor windows. It drove me crazy the number of websites which set their body text to some fraction of the window width, which looked good with a fullscreen window but terrible with a halfscreen one. Eventually I just gave up. The whole point of the web was device-independent information transfer, but somehow we allowed device-dependence to sneak it.
saratogacx 9y ago
MacOS System 7 did have a function like minimize for Apps (not individual windows). In the finder menu on the upper right, you could "hide" or "show" a program and use the same menu to switch apps, similar to the task bar in Win95. You can play around with it on archive.org. https://archive.org/details/mac_MacOS_7.0.1_compilation https://archive.org/details/mac_MacOS_7.0.1_compilation
jaclaz 9y ago
>Classic Mac OS (System 7 was contemporary to Windows 95)... System 7 was WAY earlier than Windows 95, it was 1991, a little more than 4 years earler (like an eternity): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7 "It was introduced on May 13, 1991 ..." And even 7.1 was almost exactly 3 years earlier: System 7.1 "In August 1992, the 7.1 update was released." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95 "It was released on August 24, 1995" Not even Windows 3.1 had been released at the time System 7 came out, it's competitor on MS side was DOS (version 5.00): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_DOS_operating_systems#1980–1995:_Important_events_in_DOS_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_DOS_operating_syst... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1x https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1x or some of the various semi-graphical third party shells for DOS.

hunvreus 9y ago

It drove me nuts when they updated the maximize button behavior to full screen. I use ShiftIt, a neat little Open Source tool that help me manage windows sizes and positions (including minimizing and maximizing): https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt I've recommend it to pretty much any Mac user I've met.

Angostura 9y ago
Alternatively, use opt-click to just invoke the old-style maximise. No add-on needed.
- fredsted 9y ago
  Double-clicking on empty window chrome also works.
epicide 9y ago
Haven't used ShiftIt, but I've been using Spectacle to accomplish the same thing. They seem pretty similar, overall. Works pretty well and I've had no issues.
- lloydde 9y ago
  I used Spectacle for years than was forced to switch to ShiftIt at a new employer. ShiftIt default hotkey combos didn’t conflict with other apps like Spectacle.

yoz-y 9y ago

For minimize I can't say. But the maximize works the way it works because (and this is according to the platform ideology, not some general truth) you are not supposed to maximize windows in the Windows sense of the word. The macOS interface is based around floating and overlapping windows. If you put a window over the whole screen then it could be as well maximized. This gets a bit hairy on smaller screens but really shines on huge monitors. In general macOS is more optimized around having one big screen rather than a multi-monitor setup.

ksk 9y ago
What was the big screen they optimized for in 1984?
- yoz-y 9y ago
  I do not know how the interface looked back then (I was not even born), but I can imagine that at that time a lot in interface design had yet to be discovered.

Angostura 9y ago

The old maximise system was simply designed to make the window as large as it needed to be to optimally fit content. It wasn't designed to 'make this window fit the screen'. It was designed to 'make this window fit this A4 document.

kk_cz 9y ago
Thanks, this is the first answer to this question that sort of makes sense from a Windows user point of view. I mean I still prefer the "Windows way", but this is at least viable reasoning for the "Mac way".

mmphosis 9y ago

Different ways of working, mostly stuck in our own ways of doing things. I rarely, if ever, use Minimize on the Mac. Minimize comes from Windows (and other windowing systems) where the window minimizes to an icon or button on the task bar. "Maximize" also comes from Windows (and other windowing systems.) As others have noted, in newer macos (which I don't use,) I think it oddly makes the window go full screen. Full screen is a recent macos feature -- I once asked about making my Application go full screen and Apple developer support said that going full screen did not follow their Human Interface guidelines. Something seems to have changed at Apple since I asked about that decades ago. There was no Maximize on the Mac, it is called "Zoom." The idea is that the window has two sizes and you zoom between the two sizes: One size is the size the user has resized the window to (often with much difficulty) and the other size is an ideal compact size ("optimally fit content") without hiding anything and hopefully where scroll bars do not appear -- it is a UI feature that is/was rarely, if ever, done very well by applications other than the Finder. By the way, Command-Tab to switch tasks was once an add-on from Microsoft for Mac OS. Go Microsoft! (Mac fanboy here :)

_jal 9y ago
All correct. In daily use, I almost never use those buttons - I end up manually sizing/placing windows. The the MacOS scheme of doing this leads a sort of organic, emergent window layout - I always end up with windows staggered to display relevant bits. With Windows (and with most window managers, X), things always end up either strict tiled or stacked. I'm very used to the Mac way and prefer it, but that could just be the result of long use. It doesn't waste space (Windows apps always seem to have lots of dead space to me and makes me work to be able to see parts of other windows) and forces me to switch windows far less. But it is a fiarly subtle thing.
- nine_k 9y ago
  The amount of tedious manual work required to resize and arrange several windows on MacOS (6+ to latest OSX) bothered me all the time I had a misfortune to have to use it. It does not even have something like edge snapping. My WM of choice is now Xfwm, which allows to rearrange windows easily without gaps, make windows fill available space (vertical and horizontal separately), or tile them by dragging to corners. On OSX, things like Spectacle and Magnet sort of help.

fredsted 9y ago

Depending on how you've configured your Dock, Minimize is pretty simple. Either the window just moves to the Dock, or it minimizes into the application icon (then you can right-click on the Dock icon to view a list of the windows that are minimized, or click to open the last minimized window) Maximize on Mac was NOT designed for the window to fill the whole screen, but rather to resize the window to optimally display its contents. E.g. maximizing a Preview window with a PDF document changes the width of the window to the PDF page width. (Good tip for getting along with your Mac: stop trying to maximize everything.) In a recent macOS version, Apple changed the green "maximize" button to full-screen, which is very different from maximize. Now double-clicking on most window chromes will execute the old maximize behavior.

astrocat 9y ago
> Maximize on Mac was NOT designed for the window to fill the whole screen, but rather to resize the window to optimally display its contents. The problem with this approach is I definitely do not need someone else making the decision of what is "optimal" for me. I've been using macOS for about as long as I used to use Windows now, and at this point, macOS seems to have largely abandoned the concept, which is great. Applications get either a full screen in their own isolated context, or option-click for a full-screen in a regular windowed context. The options now are a very windows-95/98 like: "either go completely full screen, or resize to whatever you like," which gives me full control of what I find optimal for any given application.
- dahauns 9y ago
  >The problem with this approach is I definitely do not need someone else making the decision of what is "optimal" for me. And that's the crux. The whole feature (in its original incarnation) rested on the false assumption that there's a singular "optimal" state at any given time. The Apple Human Interface Guidelines have been a state-of-the-art reference for good UI for a long time, but the part about the zoom button always baffled me, as it directly contradicted several Core Principles laid out in Part I of the book.
- fredsted 9y ago

smpetrey 9y ago

Isn't the maximize button a full-screen mode now?

mr_toad 9y ago

You’re holding it wrong. But seriously, minimising windows is a reflex learnt from Windows. In Windows you often need to minimise one thing to find something else. Especially the desktop. On a Mac you can usually find something more quickly in the dock. In Windows you’re far more likely to have an app maximised by default, and minimising is a natural way to switch tasks. On a Mac, minimising is not a natural way of task switching.