11 ms·

Preview is one of the most underrated pieces of software in the world today. I make the assumption that Quicklook uses Preview (because surely it must). Being

by blunte 6y ago

Preview is one of the most underrated pieces of software in the world today. I make the assumption that Quicklook uses Preview (because surely it must). Being able to hit spacebar on just about any kind of selected document/image type file and see a near instant look, multiple pages and all, is so important. Once you don't have that (move to the Windows world), you realize how much you miss it. And you can, with a small bit of effort, add capabilities for additional files such as Markdown. Being able to open a PDF or image in a fast, reliable native viewer, and even do some level of editing (such as quickly adding a signature!) is super useful. In terms of reliability, every time over the last 20 years (some distant, some recent) where I tried to live with a Linux desktop, things would stop working after a short while. Meanwhile, I have lived on my 2014 MBP since 2014, going through multiple OS upgrades in place - no wipes/reinstalls - and find it just as performant as ever. It is in most use cases more performant than my 2017 _much_ higher spec Dell XPS 15 (in Windows or Linux boot mode). There are still some things I hate, #1 being that when I cmd-tab to a window which is minimized, it doesn't raise that window. What is the f*cking point of cmd-tabbing to an application if you don't make its window visible!? This I have never understood. But generally speaking, macOS on Apple hardware is unmatched by any alternative.

usaphp 6y ago
> What is the f*cking point of cmd-tabbing to an application if you don't make its window visible!? What if you have multiple windows of the same application, and you minimize one of them, then auto opening of that window everytime you switch back to the app will be super annoying.
- mromanuk 6y ago
  And if you want to open the minimized or hidden window, after cmd-tab, do a option-cmd-tab and finally release cmd-tab. The window will get focus
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - blunte 6y ago
    What is the more common case: a user switches to a hidden app and then does NOT want to actually see a window from that app, or the user switches to an app and wants to see it. I don't need to do research to answer this question. If a user switches to an app, it's because they want to use that app. And using most apps depends heavily on being able to see them. If I want to control things without a UI, I'll go to terminal.
    - mromanuk 6y ago
      It really shine in this use case: Because only he app menu is visible, sometimes, you can open|create a file without cluttering your desktop. It’s ok for document based apps
    - chrisweekly 6y ago
      I agree w you in principle, but the minor ergonomic friction -- adding the option key to alt-tab to restore and focus a minimized window -- is not a big deal to me. That said, I never got in the habit of minimizing windows (partly bc I didn't know about the keyboard-only way to restore them), so it's a non-issue for me.
- tomaskafka 6y ago
  Just take me to most recent non-minimized window of that app. And if there is no such window left, and I told system that I want to switch to the app, then yes, of course I want the most recent window unminimized. This isn't rocket science.
  - blunte 6y ago
    This exactly.
  - toxik 6y ago
    I think there’s a setting for this behavior, or there used to be at least. Edit ah. no it’s when you click the app icon in the dock. I guess that’s the behavior sought here?
    - tomaskafka 6y ago
      Yes - I'd like this to happen when I cmd+tab to app.
  - mistersquid 6y ago
    > And if there is no such window left, and I told system that I want to switch to the app, then yes, of course I want the most recent window unminimized. If one is screensharing or presenting to an audience and the only windows in the target app are minimized but contain sensitive information, one most certainly would not want one of those minimized windows to reveal. As a sibling to your comment points out, the solution is to hold the option key down while releasing the command key. This verifies a user’s intention to reveal the first-minimized window.
    - barrkel 6y ago
      Alt-tabbing in the middle of a presentation risks displaying random information no matter what. You could tab to browser showing mail, or to Slack, or a PDF viewer showing your latest payslip, or whatever. If you have sensitive information or something which might show alerts in the middle of an important presentation, you should probably close such apps and / or mute their notifications.
aloer 6y ago
Quicklook is such an amazing feature and it seems so basic that I just don’t get why windows hasn’t added anything like that. Are there patents on this? Just an example that I have about every day: before sharing a file via file select/open dialog I can double check if it’s the correct one. I can only speculate that quicklook prevents a substantial amount of accidental information leak across the entire world :)
- LeifCarrotson 6y ago
  Because Windows users have long been dependent on Acrobat Reader (or lately, browser PDF renderers) for showing PDFs. If Apple had a relationship with a third party providing something akin to a system application like Windows and Adobe, they'd happily make a native equivalent and relegate the old product to the dustbin. Windows doesn't do that as much.
  - sbuk 6y ago
    Preview has been there from the very early days of NeXT and Display PostScript (NeXT worked on DPS with Adobe). Apple’s pdf handling has always been baked in as Quartz is ‘pdf based’.
  - 2ion 6y ago
    It does not stop at PDF / Acrobat. Windows sucks for media and document management. No thumbnails for random media / file types. No playback for random media types. Metadata may be in the files, but who cares? --- the OS makes no sensible use of them except in the details view of "library" folders to show the title and an obscure tab in Explorer's file properties dialog. Calendaring? Sorry, we don't support CalDAV. Email? Well we have IMAP support but it's a footnote. Contacts? God help you, we want you to use Outlook and Outlook only.
    - toyg 6y ago
      Microsoft had to walk a tight rope, historically, for fear of antitrust action. If they had improved Windows too much, big developers would have gone ballistic and dragged them in the courts again. Apple never had to care about this, and it shows.
tambourine_man 6y ago
> when I cmd-tab to a window There’s no such thing. You command-tab to an application, which can have many or no windows. The different mental model is probably the reason for your frustration.
- blunte 6y ago
  Tomato Tomato. As another person clarified, I'm probably trying to switch to the most recent window of a given application. For all practical purposes, the window and the application are the same thing. There may be additional windows of that app, but they are all that app.
  - ericmay 6y ago
    Eh I think the model they implemented makes sense. You are confusing the window of an application with the application itself. Cmd + Tab switches between applications, or windows. If you had multiple windows of an application like Safari open but minimized to the dock, maybe you are switching to Safari the application and then opening a new window? I believe there is a command that actually pulls up the windows individually as well? Maybe CMD + 1 or something similar? Personally I think this route is the most intuitive and makes the most sense to me, but I can empathize with your frustration. Kind of related but I generally feel annoyed whenever I use Windows for anything. It’s very unintuitive for me.
    - giovani 6y ago
      On my keyboard its CMD + ` by default, but I guess you can probably change it somewhere.
      - spfzero 6y ago
        Yep, it's cmd-`. I use the heck out of that when I have multiple spreadsheet windows open, or even an in-progress email window or two.
    - CincinnatiMan 6y ago
oplav 6y ago
I switched from Windows to OS X over 7 years ago and this is the first time I've ever learned about Quicklook. Looks like a great feature.
- cmehdy 6y ago
  If you know about brew you can also find a bunch of extra quicklook plugins: https://github.com/sindresorhus/quick-look-plugins https://github.com/sindresorhus/quick-look-plugins Works on and off for some things (video previews for example) but overall worth a quick "brew install" in my opinion.
  - specialist 6y ago
    CSV, markdown, plaintext, and JSON plugins are must-haves for office work. BetterZip's plugin is okay. Even better would be: I'd sacrifice my first born child for a "Show Package Contents" option supporting zip, webarchive, and other common composite files. (Using Finder: highlight file with .app or .dmg extension, right-click to show context menu, chose "Show Package Contents", opens new tab with selected file as "mount" point. I'd really like to know how Finder "mounts" composite files without using fuse file system thingie. Then maybe we could write plugins.)
    - eyesee 6y ago
      Because they’re not really “composite files”, they’re packages. It’s just a normal directory with a bit set to treat it as a file in context (also driven by file extension). “Show Package Contents” just opens a Finder window rooted within the package. From CLI you’ll see them as a directory.
      - specialist 6y ago
        Aha. Feeling dumb that I didn't know that. Of course they're directories with some metadata. Duh. I always kinda guessed that DMGs were something like a ZIP file. Well, not really: "3. Mounting DMGs DMGs can be mounted, just like any other file system, though technically this is what is known as a "loopback" mount (i.e. a mount backed by a local file, rather than a device file)" http://newosxbook.com/DMG.html http://newosxbook.com/DMG.html Pretty cool. Thanks for the tip. Now wondering about differences between loopback mount, FUSE, potential for seamless Finder UX integration...
oreille 6y ago
> when I cmd-tab to a window which is minimized, it doesn't raise that window Hold the option key while releasing cmd, it will raise the minimized window.
mrtksn 6y ago
Windows users who switch to macOS will complain that their new shiny and expensive machine won't let them to go through their photos in a folder using the arrow keys and they have to open the photos one by one. Then you tell them to hit the space when a photo is selected, they first look at the keyboard then at the screen and they are like "O.K. that will work", you proceed to tell them to try it on a PDF or something else and that's the moment they recognise the value that they paid for :)
- iwebdevfromhome 6y ago
  Well damn, I’ve been a mac user for 6 years now and this is the first time I hear about this option haha and it was one of my main complains
- blunte 6y ago
  I may be missing something, but aren't you describing Finder's Gallery View? In that mode, you can left/right arrow your way through the entire set of files in a folder, viewing each one (image or pdf or whatever).
  - mrtksn 6y ago
    Gallery view is pretty new and still needs to be discovered. Also not very convenient just for quickly viewing bunch of files. The view of the folder changes completely, so you get disoriented and if it's a large folder you will need t skim through one line of folders to find what you are looking for. It's good for certain use cases but it doesn't help with quickly going through some files in a large folder. On Windows, when you open a photo by clicking it, you can go to the next/prev one using the arrow keys and on macOS you can't do that. So the Windows immigrants get annoyed, naturally. On Mac, you can simply select a single file anywhere and hitting pace will very quickly show you the contents, hit space again and you are back to the folder. You can use the arrow keys to skim around and the file contents will be quickly displayed. If you first select a bunch of files and then hit space, it will loop though your selection when you use the arrow keys. It's a very convenient feature to skim through the files in a folder.
- 6y ago
bdcravens 6y ago
The PDF editing and signature workflow is so good that I never print out PDFs to sign and scan them in any more.
- blunte 6y ago
  It's so good, so fast, and so easy, (and so obviously useful), I just cannot fathom why Windows doesn't have a comparable answer for this.
  - epse 6y ago
    Antitrust lawsuit from Adobe maybe?
  - mekster 6y ago
    Sorry Windows will always be fighting with its own legacy, it cannot move forward. I don't know why people insist on using Windows. It's not good on desktop, not good on servers but good for games.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    Possibly because MS sticked to XPS rather than PDF
jackcviers3 6y ago
I had a Linux IdeaPad p400 for like 12 years with Ubuntu. 0 issues. I now have a system 76 gazelle. No problems. Ubuntu 20.04 is really easy to use. I can't stand the mbp. Hoops to jump through for everything with a cli. Extra permissions to make build tools work. Extra additions to file permissions that are incompatible with docker. Special gui with extra settings to make docker work. vpns that have to run inside the top bar and freeze up with no way to get them to shut down. Weirdness with .net core compilations. User admin only with a gui. Difficulty finding files because the finder window doesn't follow path. Extra steps to launch apps from the cli. Weird ppi so text settings that are legible everywhere else aren't in Mac. Slow keyboard repeat rates that are hard to change.
- toyg 6y ago
  It’s amazing to me how Docker became the devops tool of choice, when its experience on Mac and Windows was just so horrible for so long. Linux users have more power than they realize, in certain sectors.
- bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
  > the Finder window doesn’t follow path ⌘⇧G (“go”) > extra steps to launch apps from cli `open -a TextEdit`, `open -a Safari index.html`, etc
chrisweekly 6y ago
Similar experiences (eg w my 2012 mpb15r). You'll be happy to learn that your "#1 hate" is easily resolved: cmd-tab then hold option key down while releasing cmd-tab. Voila, the minimized window is restored with focus. :)
- BruceEel 6y ago
  Somebody needs to make a bot/AI that regularly posts semi-contentiously titled articles like the above because they spawn some of the best discussion threads on HN, I learn something new (or try something new) every time.. Thanks for the 'option-tab' trick!
- tokamak-teapot 6y ago
  Whenever I’m doing something in MacOS and the option / action I was hoping to find isn’t there, I try the same but with Option held down. The philosophy seems to be that the UI is kept clean and easy to understand but the power is always there if you need it.
  - bengale 6y ago
    This is always one of my top tips for power users moving over to macOS.
Hiopl 6y ago
This exists for Windows though as a third-party application, which points to one of the reasons why Windows is great. There's great software for nearly anything you could think of. It's one of the main things I miss when I use Linux. The usability/functionality in the applications simply isn't there and it will never be there, for whatever reason.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  Ha, I'm the other way - you're an 'apt search blah' then 'sudo apt install foo' away from just about any type of software. Chocolatey has helped bring that closer for me on Windows. I guess it's probably what ones familiar with/used to.
  - Hiopl 6y ago
    Linux has been my main OS on at least one of my devices for as long as I can remember. I still think there's a stark difference in what applications are capable of. It feels like most Linux applications try to make GUIs as simple as possible, while shunting all possible advanced features into the command line. For example, there's not a single file browser that in any way compares to Directory Opus, which is my replacement file explorer on Windows.
Tsiklon 6y ago
About your cmd-tab point, macOS in its distant past made an architectural choice to decouple the running application from the windows presenting it (I think this goes the whole way back to nextstep). So while cmd-tab does give the application focus (as you’ll see reflected in the menu bar) it won’t bring up the window.
themadsens 6y ago
You may want HyperDock[1] which enables that behaviour. There is also HyperSwitch[2] which switches windows, not apps. It's a beta, but still works great on Big Sur. [1] https://bahoom.com/hyperdock https://bahoom.com/hyperdock [2] https://bahoom.com/hyperswitch https://bahoom.com/hyperswitch
- HowardStark 6y ago
  Command + Backtick was a pretty big game changer to switch between windows. I understand the difference between that and Hyperswitch, but I’ve rarely been truly wanting for something much more than Cmd+`
- mrehler 6y ago
  Hyperdock has been unstable for awhile, and judging by comments on social media and the silence of the dev, it's finally been abandoned. I'm currently trying [DockView](https://noteifyapp.com/dockview/ https://noteifyapp.com/dockview/) from the maker of ActiveDock.
atribecalledqst 6y ago
Preview is a great program, but unfortunately when I upgraded from Mavericks to High Sierra on my 2012 Macbook Pro, I started to notice that Preview rendering is now blurry. And I never figured out how to fix it -- nothing I found online worked. What a bummer. xpdf satisfies most of my PDF reading needs now instead. It has tabs too, which is handy. The change to High Sierra also broke some nice iTunes behavior I had been exploiting previously that let me connect to my home iTunes share over a VPN connection. Ah well.
richardboegli 6y ago
There is a Quicklook clone on Windows called Quicklook [0]. Not associated with it, just found it when seeing if there was an equivalent for Windows platform. https://github.com/QL-Win/QuickLook https://github.com/QL-Win/QuickLook
Epitom3 6y ago
> But generally speaking, macOS on Apple hardware is unmatched by any alternative. lmfao. About the preview thing ; - ranger (cli) has the file preview thing, no need to press spacebar. Has all the vim keybindings, you can cycle preview through files much faster than on macos. - (sushi)[https://github.com/GNOME/sushi https://github.com/GNOME/sushi], if you want to use gui. - all of this is free software.
zzzzzzzza 6y ago
"In terms of reliability, every time over the last 20 years (some distant, some recent) where I tried to live with a Linux desktop, things would stop working after a short while." nixos (a linux variant) addresses this on a much deeper level than any other os.

by blunte 6y ago

usaphp 6y ago

> What is the f*cking point of cmd-tabbing to an application if you don't make its window visible!? What if you have multiple windows of the same application, and you minimize one of them, then auto opening of that window everytime you switch back to the app will be super annoying.

mromanuk 6y ago
And if you want to open the minimized or hidden window, after cmd-tab, do a option-cmd-tab and finally release cmd-tab. The window will get focus
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- blunte 6y ago
  What is the more common case: a user switches to a hidden app and then does NOT want to actually see a window from that app, or the user switches to an app and wants to see it. I don't need to do research to answer this question. If a user switches to an app, it's because they want to use that app. And using most apps depends heavily on being able to see them. If I want to control things without a UI, I'll go to terminal.
  - mromanuk 6y ago
    It really shine in this use case: Because only he app menu is visible, sometimes, you can open|create a file without cluttering your desktop. It’s ok for document based apps
  - chrisweekly 6y ago
    I agree w you in principle, but the minor ergonomic friction -- adding the option key to alt-tab to restore and focus a minimized window -- is not a big deal to me. That said, I never got in the habit of minimizing windows (partly bc I didn't know about the keyboard-only way to restore them), so it's a non-issue for me.
tomaskafka 6y ago
Just take me to most recent non-minimized window of that app. And if there is no such window left, and I told system that I want to switch to the app, then yes, of course I want the most recent window unminimized. This isn't rocket science.
- blunte 6y ago
  This exactly.
- toxik 6y ago
  I think there’s a setting for this behavior, or there used to be at least. Edit ah. no it’s when you click the app icon in the dock. I guess that’s the behavior sought here?
  - tomaskafka 6y ago
    Yes - I'd like this to happen when I cmd+tab to app.
- mistersquid 6y ago
  > And if there is no such window left, and I told system that I want to switch to the app, then yes, of course I want the most recent window unminimized. If one is screensharing or presenting to an audience and the only windows in the target app are minimized but contain sensitive information, one most certainly would not want one of those minimized windows to reveal. As a sibling to your comment points out, the solution is to hold the option key down while releasing the command key. This verifies a user’s intention to reveal the first-minimized window.
  - barrkel 6y ago
    Alt-tabbing in the middle of a presentation risks displaying random information no matter what. You could tab to browser showing mail, or to Slack, or a PDF viewer showing your latest payslip, or whatever. If you have sensitive information or something which might show alerts in the middle of an important presentation, you should probably close such apps and / or mute their notifications.

aloer 6y ago

Quicklook is such an amazing feature and it seems so basic that I just don’t get why windows hasn’t added anything like that. Are there patents on this? Just an example that I have about every day: before sharing a file via file select/open dialog I can double check if it’s the correct one. I can only speculate that quicklook prevents a substantial amount of accidental information leak across the entire world :)

LeifCarrotson 6y ago
Because Windows users have long been dependent on Acrobat Reader (or lately, browser PDF renderers) for showing PDFs. If Apple had a relationship with a third party providing something akin to a system application like Windows and Adobe, they'd happily make a native equivalent and relegate the old product to the dustbin. Windows doesn't do that as much.
- sbuk 6y ago
  Preview has been there from the very early days of NeXT and Display PostScript (NeXT worked on DPS with Adobe). Apple’s pdf handling has always been baked in as Quartz is ‘pdf based’.
- 2ion 6y ago
  It does not stop at PDF / Acrobat. Windows sucks for media and document management. No thumbnails for random media / file types. No playback for random media types. Metadata may be in the files, but who cares? --- the OS makes no sensible use of them except in the details view of "library" folders to show the title and an obscure tab in Explorer's file properties dialog. Calendaring? Sorry, we don't support CalDAV. Email? Well we have IMAP support but it's a footnote. Contacts? God help you, we want you to use Outlook and Outlook only.
  - toyg 6y ago
    Microsoft had to walk a tight rope, historically, for fear of antitrust action. If they had improved Windows too much, big developers would have gone ballistic and dragged them in the courts again. Apple never had to care about this, and it shows.

tambourine_man 6y ago

> when I cmd-tab to a window There’s no such thing. You command-tab to an application, which can have many or no windows. The different mental model is probably the reason for your frustration.

blunte 6y ago
Tomato Tomato. As another person clarified, I'm probably trying to switch to the most recent window of a given application. For all practical purposes, the window and the application are the same thing. There may be additional windows of that app, but they are all that app.
- ericmay 6y ago
  Eh I think the model they implemented makes sense. You are confusing the window of an application with the application itself. Cmd + Tab switches between applications, or windows. If you had multiple windows of an application like Safari open but minimized to the dock, maybe you are switching to Safari the application and then opening a new window? I believe there is a command that actually pulls up the windows individually as well? Maybe CMD + 1 or something similar? Personally I think this route is the most intuitive and makes the most sense to me, but I can empathize with your frustration. Kind of related but I generally feel annoyed whenever I use Windows for anything. It’s very unintuitive for me.
  - giovani 6y ago
    On my keyboard its CMD + ` by default, but I guess you can probably change it somewhere.
    - spfzero 6y ago
      Yep, it's cmd-`. I use the heck out of that when I have multiple spreadsheet windows open, or even an in-progress email window or two.
  - CincinnatiMan 6y ago

oplav 6y ago

I switched from Windows to OS X over 7 years ago and this is the first time I've ever learned about Quicklook. Looks like a great feature.

cmehdy 6y ago
If you know about brew you can also find a bunch of extra quicklook plugins: https://github.com/sindresorhus/quick-look-plugins https://github.com/sindresorhus/quick-look-plugins Works on and off for some things (video previews for example) but overall worth a quick "brew install" in my opinion.
- specialist 6y ago
  CSV, markdown, plaintext, and JSON plugins are must-haves for office work. BetterZip's plugin is okay. Even better would be: I'd sacrifice my first born child for a "Show Package Contents" option supporting zip, webarchive, and other common composite files. (Using Finder: highlight file with .app or .dmg extension, right-click to show context menu, chose "Show Package Contents", opens new tab with selected file as "mount" point. I'd really like to know how Finder "mounts" composite files without using fuse file system thingie. Then maybe we could write plugins.)
  - eyesee 6y ago
    Because they’re not really “composite files”, they’re packages. It’s just a normal directory with a bit set to treat it as a file in context (also driven by file extension). “Show Package Contents” just opens a Finder window rooted within the package. From CLI you’ll see them as a directory.
    - specialist 6y ago
      Aha. Feeling dumb that I didn't know that. Of course they're directories with some metadata. Duh. I always kinda guessed that DMGs were something like a ZIP file. Well, not really: "3. Mounting DMGs DMGs can be mounted, just like any other file system, though technically this is what is known as a "loopback" mount (i.e. a mount backed by a local file, rather than a device file)" http://newosxbook.com/DMG.html http://newosxbook.com/DMG.html Pretty cool. Thanks for the tip. Now wondering about differences between loopback mount, FUSE, potential for seamless Finder UX integration...

oreille 6y ago

> when I cmd-tab to a window which is minimized, it doesn't raise that window Hold the option key while releasing cmd, it will raise the minimized window.

mrtksn 6y ago

Windows users who switch to macOS will complain that their new shiny and expensive machine won't let them to go through their photos in a folder using the arrow keys and they have to open the photos one by one. Then you tell them to hit the space when a photo is selected, they first look at the keyboard then at the screen and they are like "O.K. that will work", you proceed to tell them to try it on a PDF or something else and that's the moment they recognise the value that they paid for :)

iwebdevfromhome 6y ago
Well damn, I’ve been a mac user for 6 years now and this is the first time I hear about this option haha and it was one of my main complains
blunte 6y ago
I may be missing something, but aren't you describing Finder's Gallery View? In that mode, you can left/right arrow your way through the entire set of files in a folder, viewing each one (image or pdf or whatever).
- mrtksn 6y ago
  Gallery view is pretty new and still needs to be discovered. Also not very convenient just for quickly viewing bunch of files. The view of the folder changes completely, so you get disoriented and if it's a large folder you will need t skim through one line of folders to find what you are looking for. It's good for certain use cases but it doesn't help with quickly going through some files in a large folder. On Windows, when you open a photo by clicking it, you can go to the next/prev one using the arrow keys and on macOS you can't do that. So the Windows immigrants get annoyed, naturally. On Mac, you can simply select a single file anywhere and hitting pace will very quickly show you the contents, hit space again and you are back to the folder. You can use the arrow keys to skim around and the file contents will be quickly displayed. If you first select a bunch of files and then hit space, it will loop though your selection when you use the arrow keys. It's a very convenient feature to skim through the files in a folder.
6y ago

bdcravens 6y ago

The PDF editing and signature workflow is so good that I never print out PDFs to sign and scan them in any more.

blunte 6y ago
It's so good, so fast, and so easy, (and so obviously useful), I just cannot fathom why Windows doesn't have a comparable answer for this.
- epse 6y ago
  Antitrust lawsuit from Adobe maybe?
- mekster 6y ago
  Sorry Windows will always be fighting with its own legacy, it cannot move forward. I don't know why people insist on using Windows. It's not good on desktop, not good on servers but good for games.
- fomine3 6y ago
  Possibly because MS sticked to XPS rather than PDF

jackcviers3 6y ago

I had a Linux IdeaPad p400 for like 12 years with Ubuntu. 0 issues. I now have a system 76 gazelle. No problems. Ubuntu 20.04 is really easy to use. I can't stand the mbp. Hoops to jump through for everything with a cli. Extra permissions to make build tools work. Extra additions to file permissions that are incompatible with docker. Special gui with extra settings to make docker work. vpns that have to run inside the top bar and freeze up with no way to get them to shut down. Weirdness with .net core compilations. User admin only with a gui. Difficulty finding files because the finder window doesn't follow path. Extra steps to launch apps from the cli. Weird ppi so text settings that are legible everywhere else aren't in Mac. Slow keyboard repeat rates that are hard to change.

toyg 6y ago
It’s amazing to me how Docker became the devops tool of choice, when its experience on Mac and Windows was just so horrible for so long. Linux users have more power than they realize, in certain sectors.
bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
> the Finder window doesn’t follow path ⌘⇧G (“go”) > extra steps to launch apps from cli `open -a TextEdit`, `open -a Safari index.html`, etc

chrisweekly 6y ago

Similar experiences (eg w my 2012 mpb15r). You'll be happy to learn that your "#1 hate" is easily resolved: cmd-tab then hold option key down while releasing cmd-tab. Voila, the minimized window is restored with focus. :)

BruceEel 6y ago
Somebody needs to make a bot/AI that regularly posts semi-contentiously titled articles like the above because they spawn some of the best discussion threads on HN, I learn something new (or try something new) every time.. Thanks for the 'option-tab' trick!
tokamak-teapot 6y ago
Whenever I’m doing something in MacOS and the option / action I was hoping to find isn’t there, I try the same but with Option held down. The philosophy seems to be that the UI is kept clean and easy to understand but the power is always there if you need it.
- bengale 6y ago
  This is always one of my top tips for power users moving over to macOS.

Hiopl 6y ago

This exists for Windows though as a third-party application, which points to one of the reasons why Windows is great. There's great software for nearly anything you could think of. It's one of the main things I miss when I use Linux. The usability/functionality in the applications simply isn't there and it will never be there, for whatever reason.

pbhjpbhj 6y ago
Ha, I'm the other way - you're an 'apt search blah' then 'sudo apt install foo' away from just about any type of software. Chocolatey has helped bring that closer for me on Windows. I guess it's probably what ones familiar with/used to.
- Hiopl 6y ago
  Linux has been my main OS on at least one of my devices for as long as I can remember. I still think there's a stark difference in what applications are capable of. It feels like most Linux applications try to make GUIs as simple as possible, while shunting all possible advanced features into the command line. For example, there's not a single file browser that in any way compares to Directory Opus, which is my replacement file explorer on Windows.

Tsiklon 6y ago

About your cmd-tab point, macOS in its distant past made an architectural choice to decouple the running application from the windows presenting it (I think this goes the whole way back to nextstep). So while cmd-tab does give the application focus (as you’ll see reflected in the menu bar) it won’t bring up the window.

themadsens 6y ago

You may want HyperDock[1] which enables that behaviour. There is also HyperSwitch[2] which switches windows, not apps. It's a beta, but still works great on Big Sur. [1] https://bahoom.com/hyperdock https://bahoom.com/hyperdock [2] https://bahoom.com/hyperswitch https://bahoom.com/hyperswitch

HowardStark 6y ago
Command + Backtick was a pretty big game changer to switch between windows. I understand the difference between that and Hyperswitch, but I’ve rarely been truly wanting for something much more than Cmd+`
mrehler 6y ago
Hyperdock has been unstable for awhile, and judging by comments on social media and the silence of the dev, it's finally been abandoned. I'm currently trying [DockView](https://noteifyapp.com/dockview/ https://noteifyapp.com/dockview/) from the maker of ActiveDock.

atribecalledqst 6y ago

Preview is a great program, but unfortunately when I upgraded from Mavericks to High Sierra on my 2012 Macbook Pro, I started to notice that Preview rendering is now blurry. And I never figured out how to fix it -- nothing I found online worked. What a bummer. xpdf satisfies most of my PDF reading needs now instead. It has tabs too, which is handy. The change to High Sierra also broke some nice iTunes behavior I had been exploiting previously that let me connect to my home iTunes share over a VPN connection. Ah well.

richardboegli 6y ago

There is a Quicklook clone on Windows called Quicklook [0]. Not associated with it, just found it when seeing if there was an equivalent for Windows platform. https://github.com/QL-Win/QuickLook https://github.com/QL-Win/QuickLook

Epitom3 6y ago

> But generally speaking, macOS on Apple hardware is unmatched by any alternative. lmfao. About the preview thing ; - ranger (cli) has the file preview thing, no need to press spacebar. Has all the vim keybindings, you can cycle preview through files much faster than on macos. - (sushi)[https://github.com/GNOME/sushi https://github.com/GNOME/sushi], if you want to use gui. - all of this is free software.

zzzzzzzza 6y ago

"In terms of reliability, every time over the last 20 years (some distant, some recent) where I tried to live with a Linux desktop, things would stop working after a short while." nixos (a linux variant) addresses this on a much deeper level than any other os.