I really tried to like macOS for an entire year. I used Yabai[1] as tilling window manager which is much better than Amethyst mentioned in the article. I also wrote my own compose key tool macos-compose[2] and rofi-like clone choosem[3] (eventually bought into Alfred).
Yet with all of this effort I still went back to linux after a year (Arch with Qtile and Gnome). What really killed macos for me was the fact that animations could not be disabled entirely and everything felt like it's behind several ms of a delay. I work on the move so I don't have the luxury of multi-screen setup so switching between programs, workspaces and windows is the most important part of my workflow - it just drove me nuts.
Now I run simple Lenovo yoga laptop with arch+qtile+gnome and honestly, my performance at work at least doubled. That's my anecdote anyway.
Well, if you're very opinionated regarding your setup, trying to force macOS into your ways won't work, macOS is great and very easy to use and gives you zero problems but you have to adapt to it. I've also moved after many years of linux and I could not be happier. I like easy and I like to focus on getting my actual work done, I got tired of spending weeks personalizing stuff, dealing with drivers issues, tuning the trackpad, adjusting applications to work with different dpi screens, etc, etc. For me it was a never ending war and a lot of time wasted.
It’s pretty bad when you show everyone enthusiastically that when you open your MacBook it wakes up immediately and actually works. They think you’re insane rather than a former Linux user who has programmed irrational fear that the AMD mobile GPU drivers are going to cause a panic.
10 years ago I bought Macbook Air to install and run Arch Linux on it. Since at that time Linus Torvalds was also using Macbooks and they were on Intel platform, it had all the drivers available.
Then in 2014 I was given the next Macbook Pro at work, and that did not support Linux anymore. Then I got upgraded version in 2019, and that one has even worse support.
During that time I had to get used to macOS, but I simply could not. Those animations or something else make it feel so slow in comparison to Linux desktop.
Then once pandemic hit and I started working from home, I could use my Linux desktop for work. It feels so much better.
I am not sure why macOS feels so sluggish in comparison.
Now I am hoping for Asahi Linux to support the new M1 Macbooks well enough to use them on a daily basis, but not sure if it will ever happen. I think the main thing that is missing is the GPU driver. I have not yet seen a good community build open source GPU driver that has decent performance.
> Then in 2014 I was given the next Macbook Pro at work, and that did not support Linux anymore.
interesting, the MBP 2014 is what I will forever remember as "one of the best computer I ran linux on". With archlinux almost everything worked from the very beginning except the webcam driver, and much faster than macOS. It just took some time for Chrome and Firefox to adapt to Retina because those weren't following Xft.dpi system property, but otherwise...
is it actually necessary, if you're using it for work (assuming you don't do anything heavily gpu dependent)? Supposedly asahi works pretty well even with just a framebuffer, being powered entirely by the CPU. I probably wouldn't want to run that, but even an inefficient gpu driver should probably be fine for office type work, as long as it's not glitchy, right?
It's incredible how sluggish animations can make a OS feel.
The first thing I do when I get a new Android phone is enabling the developer options and turning off all animations. The phone feels a lot faster then, especially switching apps.
I have more than one friend who I showed this and they suddenly didn't feel the need to replace their phone with a newer, faster one.
Yeah, same here. I'm now on an AMD X13 gen 2 and it's fantastic. I can't get temp to go past 68 degrees even with all 8x2 cores at 100% on performance profile. Fan is also completely silent and only goes on with sustained usage. Why deal with the pain of a poor WM/DE (OS X) and all the arm nonsense when you can get excellent thermals and performance w/ a Linux laptop.
Interesting. I switched to an AMD laptop for over half a year (ThinkPad T14 AMD). And I went back to a MacBook and convinced me not to go back to Linux on a laptop for at least half a decade.
Battery life was terrible compared to a Mac (6 hours if I was lucky, barely 4 hours when in video meetings). S3 Suspend worked badly, the battery would drain very quickly. Devices would often not come back after wake (particularly the trackpad). During video meetings, the fans would go into full blast (though they were more quiet than most non-M1 laptops). Noise cancellation was quite bad on Linux (ok-ish in Windows). Lenovo’s own USB-C dock wouldn’t work with 4k@60Hz (works with Windows, Linux misconfigures the lanes and didn’t use HBR3).
It was one of the models that was certified for Linux (IIRC even Fedora). But the whole experience was miserable. I bought an M1 MacBook and didn’t look back.
I’m in a team where every member was forced into macOS against their will, because a lot of project scripts were hardcoded for macOS by a long-gone “architect”. My biggest gripes with macOS, after decades of Windows and Linux:
- Windows has better Linux support than macOS (WSL gives better integration which means Docker is easier to use compared to Minikube via Hyperkit vm)
- macOS doesn’t have the crucial software I need: FAR Manager
- I’ve had terrible experience with Apple’s customer support in the past where they couldn’t fix broken font antialiasing for external monitors
- I’ve been plagued by serious macOS bugs where it would cause 100% cpu load that could only be cured with closing/reopening the lid, and there are still some sleep-related bugs in it, whereas on Windows everything’s fine
- The window manager in macOS lacks basic features compared to Windows: no tiling, but Windows gets it out of the box with Win+arrows
- All hotkeys on macOS are different from the rest of the world (Windows, Linux) for no good reason and it makes switching between computers very difficult. And no, switching Cmd to Ctrl doesn’t solve it
- Rounded window corners make the first character on the bottom line of terminals unreadable
The whole point of the CTRL key is for control characters when using a terminal. The command key on Macs (and the subsequent key pairs) predates CTRL-Z/X/C/V by around 10 years - Larry Tesler, had conceived the notion while at PARC working on text editing for Alto, decided to use the sequence for the Lisa OS.
Originally, Windows followed the IBM CUA [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access] standard, which it still does to a great extent today - Pressing Alt will still activate the menu for instance. In this standard, the cut command was Shift+Del, Copy was Ctrl+Ins and paste was Shift+Ins; which I believe still work as of Windows 10. Microsoft introduced CTRL-Z/X/C/V in Windows 3.1, released in 1992.
In short, the keyboard shortcuts for undo/cut/copy/paste have been constant on the Mac since it’s inception 37 years ago. It’s been “standard” in the Windows world for 29 years
> - Windows has better Linux support than macOS (WSL gives better integration which means Docker is easier to use compared to Minikube via Hyperkit vm)
'bit of a duh, that.
> My biggest gripes with macOS, after decades of Windows and Linux: [...] macOS doesn’t have the crucial software I need: FAR Manager
...
FAR doesn't work on linux either, the unofficial linux port (of 2.0) advertises macOS support, and midnight commander works everywhere.
> - The window manager in macOS lacks basic features compared to Windows: no tiling, but Windows gets it out of the box with Win+arrows
BigSur added a tiling system, but it's really just a split-window fullscreen (so you can't have one half of the screen full and the rest mixed-purpose). Much easier to use a tiler like divvy or BetterSnapTool.
Then again I find windows' tiling just as useless as macos' though it's less prescriptive, I use PowerToys' FancyZones there.
> All hotkeys on macOS are different from the rest of the world (Windows, Linux) for no good reason
That's next-level dishonest. There are excellent reasons for it:
1. macos was first
2. macos has always dedicated its own modkey to system-level shortcuts
3. this also makes ctrl and opt (alt) much more regular and convenient
> - All hotkeys on macOS are different from the rest of the world (Windows, Linux) for no good reason and it makes switching between computers very difficult. And no, switching Cmd to Ctrl doesn’t solve it
There is a reason they’re different, and it’s because those are the shortcuts that macs have used since 1985. It would extremely upsetting to Mac userbase if all of the sudden shortcuts were wincloned.
I also think that most Mac shortcuts make more sense in the modern context; they’re nearly all mnemonic (e.g. Cmd+W to close a window and Cmd+Q to quit) whereas Windows shortcuts are more arbitrary and rooted in limitations of legacy platforms (Alt+F4 doesn’t mean anything to someone new to computers, for instance).
There's also a "unicode hex input" keyboard, though it takes over the entirety of the option mapping (option-[0-9a-f] becomes a charcode, the rest has no effect).
They can pry my Linux from my dead cold hands. I want to be the master of my computer, as it is an extension of myself. I'll thus use an open source OS.
Out of frustration for this, I wrote Craig Federighi an email some years back. I asked if it was possible to just disable the spaces animation without disabling ALL animations, since the rolling animation makes me nauseous. Previously I had used yabai, but it needed to disable SIP in order to switch without an animation, which was a no-go for me.
He responded with several follow up questions, but nothing came of it unfortunately… Hopefully it’s on someone’s task list somewhere
I actually use it for the opposite function—to make cmd+` better at switching between windows within the same app—but it works great as an alternative cmd+tab if “window switcher” fits your mental model better than “app switcher”.
You're probably aware of this already, but if you command tab to an app you can use the up and down cursor keys to display all open windows for that app. You can also use command+` to cycle through open windows of the focused app.
You can disable animations when switching between spaces. I use skhd for this to map the hotkeys to the Yabai command to switch spaces. Pressing f13 goes to the previous space immediately and f14 to the next space.
I've tried this and much more but there's still noticable delay compared to Linux' twms and it's not only about workspace switching. There's this huge thread on stackoverflow[1] which is a great illustration of what a mess macos display server is.
I did the exact opposite. I was on MacOS since 10.2.
But lately I felt things have become way too locked down (both hardware and software), too dumbed down (too many apps resemble mobile apps with limited functionality) and too opinionated. Sometimes I just want things differently. Another reason was that many new features are specific to iCloud integration and as I use many OSes (both computer and mobile) I could not take advantage of those anyway. I need cross platform. So a lot of selling points became irrelevant.
I moved to FreeBSD with KDE on top and it felt like a breath of fresh air finally being able to set up my system the way I want it. This is so empowering.
It became my daily driver about a year ago and I haven't looked back though I still use Mac and Windows for work, Windows personally for gaming and Linux for some servers.
Of course I lost some stuff too like Apple's excellent multi DPI and great hardware integration. And many apps that were great like pixelmator. But I gained a lot of configurability and the ability to upgrade my hardware again.
Nitpick here - Apple actually removed support for decent font rendering on 1x DPI displays so I don't think it's fair to say they support multiple DPI anymore. Completely agree with getting out of Macos though!
- I had used it until 7.0 in the past and missed the simplicity of having one single platform (rather than Linux with its kernel and the many distributions all doing things differently).
- The excellent handbook
- Almost devoid of corporate influence. Linux is being steered into the warm and fuzzy corporate domain. Many big players try to get their IP adopted by the Linux mainstream. Canonical with Snaps for example, Redhat with Gnome, etc. The big tech players are the biggest kernel contributors now. It moves from choices good for customers to the ones that are good for big tech.
- Non-opinionated platform. Some distros are also becoming quite opinionated like Mac. I did try to play the Apple game for a while (like I said it was my daily driver since 10.2) but they kept annoying me more and more by deprecating things I used. I want choices again.
- Stable platform but with rolling app packages. For example if KDE comes out with a new version I will see it usually a day or 2 later.
- Couldn't find a Linux distro I really liked. I like minimalism but without Arch's elitism. Debian would have been the closest but I have bad experiences with major upgrades. What I would have preferred would be something like Alpine for the desktop. I looked at Adelie Linux which is exactly that but it was too premature.
- The ports tree is really amazing. You're always able to change default package settings and recompile them
- Jails are more powerful than linux containers, though they lack a framework a la docker. This is why I still use Linux on servers.
So this was mainly it :) Unfortuantely running KDE did require installing some linuxisms like Dbus but overall it's not too bad.
Oh yes I use a desktop (intel NUC to be precise). I have no need for WiFi, I didn't even look at getting it going.
I'm not a big fan of laptops at all for ergonomics. Most of my systems are desktops, the only laptop I have is a really minimal one for the makerspace (and I have one for work).
I never said it was for everyone by the way. Just that it works for me! In general, things that work for everyone don't tend to work well for me at all, this is my biggest issue with Apple now because they make a product that is ultra-mainstream and very opinionated. You either have to go with the flow (which irritates me) or add a galore of thirdparty addon products to make it work your way which get broken in every major (and often minor) macOS release.
I did try to go the second way for a while but it got too annoying with everything constantly breaking. From reading the article this thread is about, I see the author is going the same way (lots of addon products) and I wonder if they will also be caught by this in the future.
For me Linux is about freedom. Other systems might be better in UI/UX or performance (e.g. give more FPS in games for NVidia cards), but I remember the times when Microsoft dominated the IT world and it looked scary.
All corporations strive to fragment the market using non-compatible technologies and then to monopolize the market by consuming other fragments.
This strategy failed in the 90s with the arrival of Linux. Although many times I felt like the whole world will become Microsoft/Wintel, I think we barely missed.
Now, corporations are trying to do it e.g. via forcing everybody into the cloud and killing open protocols. E.g. I have several email accounts and I can't gather mail from all of my mailboxes in one application. Situation is even worse with Calendars. I have two jobs and also my own personal calendar server and I can't collect all my calendars in one app also. I have to routinely check Google Calendar, because even though I can add it to my Thunderbird Calendar, moved or canceled events changes are not propagating to Thunderbird. And I can't integrate Microsoft Outlook calendar into my Thunderbird at all.
I really don't want to rely on whims of one corporation. Also, regarding MacBooks: I remember when the touchbar had no alternatives and it is really awful. This is what monopoly means: you have to live with bad decisions. You have to pay absurd money for a piece of cloth or a roller for the desktop case.
Since this is for work my choice was between a MacBook or Windows-based laptop. Personally I wouldn't even have considered using anything else than Linux.
Rectangle (and spectacle before it) is one of those absolutely essential tools for me when working on my mac. I didn't realize how essential it was to my workflow until it was accidentally disabled a few days ago and I struggled hard to use my laptop.
Happily donated to the author of an app so essential for my day to day productivity to show my gratitude for making it and making it open source. If the author happens to read this: thank you!
Also, you'd think Apple would natively support window tiling, but apparently their UX and desktop design philosophy is that they know best when it comes to window size and placement.
So does Rectangle. I'm using it right now on a 49" U/W, with this Firefox window on the right-hand third, VSCode in the center third, and Discord in the top-left 6th, and Dune (2021) playing in IINA in the bottom-left 6th :-)
All tied to global keyboard shortcuts too. Free, open source, and does exactly what you've asked for.
Daily drove mac for 5-7 years after a childhood of tinkering with Linux installs (no professional development) and falling in love with an AwesomeWM setup with custom keybinds.
After getting into professional dev during / after high school I ended up using Divvy for an OSX window manager. It wasn’t fantastic, but I could set up custom keybinds and it was “reminiscent” of those tiling WMs I found so much love for as a pre-adolescent.
I recently (2ish years ago) switched from mac to a Debian then eventually Pop OS setup for my daily driver development environment. While not as robust as a custom arch setup with a tiling WM like awesome, Mutter is quite good and everything PopOS offers out of the box has been fantastic. Perhaps one of these days I will find the time to dive back into arch and configure a _truly_ efficient and customized workstation / dev env :-)
It’s interesting to see all of these alternative, perhaps even _better_ / more robust / more FOSS friendly mac WMs being listed here. I’m keen on giving them a try whenever I end up back on a mac workstation, but I cannot deny that my Divvy lifetime license has served me incredibly well for years, with support through many big OS upgrades.
I switched to it after having some issues with rectangle sending some of my windows into the abyss (way outside of the screen) which forced me to kill the app and restart it to get it back. But if Rectangle works for you that's good too, it's probably easier to configure.
I've been v happy with Divvy for many years. It's not auto-tiling, but it's perfect for for my purposes. Quick cmd-shift-arrow puts a window in [top 1/2, bottom 1/2, left 1/2, right 1/2] or cmd-shift-enter [for fullscreen] (across 2 monitors)... it's exactly right for me to avoid ever reaching for the mouse to position windows.
Too bad TotalSpaces 2 does not work with Monterey or M1 macs, so I am really looking for another solution that can enable this. I used to run skhd + yabai, but something about that did not click as good as with TotalSpaces 2.
Anybody know a solution for Monterey & M1 that you can use to switch between workspaces with the keyboard, without any delay ?
I use rectangle with a 5k2k 40” ultra wide monitor and it’s awesome. Very flexible and customizable, and I highly recommended it. Did I mention it’s free and open source? :)
Which monitor? I'd been waiting for the LG (forever) and finally ordered the Lenovo, although my shipping updates keep changing. I'll have to try rectangle once it's here.
Rectangle and its paid cousin, Hookshot (https://hookshot.app) are great. I use Hookshot.
They are the best window managers I've used on MacOS, because the resize features work flawlessly every single time. Other ones I've tried (e.g. bettertouchtool) have occasional issues with that.
They'd be perfect if they supported full customization of drop zones. They have some limited customization, including via the command line, but it's nothing compared to some of the other apps that are out there.
Hookshot does allow customization of the positions of the window throw (and long throw). You can create a custom shortcuts in the wrench and ruler tab, and then select the custom shortcut from the configure button for the window throw, at the end of the list. I realize this can feel a little hidden in the UI, so I'm planning on making it a little more straightforward in a future release.
The custom shortcuts in Hookshot are beyond what I've seen in most apps, especially since you can customize what happens in repeated executions of the custom shortcuts. Let me know what other apps out there have the customization that you are referring to.
Also check out https://highlyopinionated.co/swish/ for a gesture-based window manager by swiping on titlebars. It also features snake-selector keyboard shortcuts, so there's really nothing to memorize.
All thumbs up for Rectangle. Taken me a while to memorize the various key maps, but they're pretty intuitive actually once you get the pattern. Memorizing those is key to really making the tool rock. I do a thirds a lot.
I recently started using MacOS. Rectangle is one the most useful apps I’ve come across… and free. I like that you can add padding to the windows. With keybind customization it’s a nice replacement for a tiling window manager.
I used to love iTerm2 but the only thing that it was missing was that I couldn't set it up as I wanted with a script when I needed to install a new macOS from scratch (there's probably a feature that allows that and I didn't notice).
I moved to tmux + Alacritty [1] (Rust hype and speeed) which is cross-platform and only needs its config file, a nice and clean yaml, in the right place to restore it as I want. Now when I full wipe my Mac I just need to run the script that pulls the config file from GitHub and tada! Also, the configuration file is almost identical to my Linux one so I can move around similarly and have a consistent look.
I'm also used to replace macOS programs like `sed`,`grep`,`getopt`,`ssh` (macOS OpenBSD one won't work with Yubikey),`coreutils` and `awk` with the GNU version. You can download them with Homebrew and to replace them with the macOS default ones you just need to put them at the beginning of your path like this:
However now that I don’t daily drive mac as much, I’ve defaulted back to iTerm 2 for when I do happen to be doing something on my mac. The default configuration is quite good out of the box. All I really need to do post-install is get my beloved zsh + ohmyzsh plug-ins and I’m good to go :-)
As a recent convert from Alacritty to Kitty, I can confirm this. Kitty blew Alacritty out of the water in the first 10 mins of my experience with it.
Like holy crap, it's a very well written and well thought out piece of software. And it's fast. I'm all about the Rust hype, but Kitty reduced latency drastically.
With Mac you can usually just copy your entire ~/Library/Preferences folder to get all your apps back the way they were on a new Mac. It's a collection of pliat files that basically are equivalent to the registry on Windows.
There's even a system wide equivalent at /Library/Preferences
I highly recommend Hammerspoon[1] for any macOS automation tasks you want to do. It is not only extensible but alleviates the need for using multiple tools due to its broad feature set.
The only downside after two years of using Hammerspoon is that the community is small since it isn't as user-friendly as yabai, amethyst, etc. However, you'll probably enjoy its open-ended nature, given your article.
What works best for me is to not really fiddle with the setup too much beyond the defaults or to install redundant stuff, like using brew to get a fresher version of ssh or installing iterm2 when terminal does the job, or otherwise spending time on window dressing.
I try and lean into the philosophy of the mac, which is that its a desktop which behaves like a real desk. Right now I have 15 windows from various applications open on this one desktop, and its in a giant pile just as if I had a bunch of papers and files in a messy pile on my desk. This works great because you can press a button or swipe along the trackpad and spread out this pile, exposing everything that's in it along with all your other desktops, as if you are spreading out the stacks of papers on your desk.
IMO this method is how you focus on stuff anyway. Your eyes aren't looking at the 12 different things in your tiling window manager at once, so you might as well just have a few things pulled up on top of your pile of windows that are of focus and take advantage of your screen real estate rather than have a bunch of tiny panes artfully spaced. The mouse makes it easy to do fast and sloppy window adjustments which are good enough.
Same. Even if I don't like the defaults, I try as hard as humanly possible not to start fiddling with them. I learn to live with them, until the defaults become my preference.
Now any clean VM or freshly installed machine or borrowed computer at work is set up to my preference. Do I maximize my productivity or have everything exactly perfect? No. But I'd rather have my nails pulled out than tweaking things. If I have to edit a configuration textfile, the computer goes out the window. My OS isn't an important part of my workday. It should just start my IDE and get out of the way.
A few tips/software recommendation in no particular order:
- On iTerm2 you can setup a system wide hotkey to toggle a floating terminal in front of all your windows, whatever you're doing [1]. This works even in full screen apps. It really changed my workflow with iTerm, and is really handy.
- For system stats in the menubar, I really recommend iStat Menu [2]. It's paid (12$ for a license), but the quality of the graphs and interface makes it well worth it imo.
- If you have an external display and want to precisely tweek your resolution, I recommend SWitchResX [3]. It's mostly a GUI that wraps some display CLI tools. With it I adjust the resolution of my 4k external monitor currently, running it at 3200x1800 with HiDPI, and adjust it based on my eye fatigue.
- As a more powerful and versatile replacement to Spotlight (Cmd+Space), Alfred [4]. You can customize it to run anything you want, from converting timestamps to dates, opening apps, search the whole system, run scripts, etc
- If you have too many icons in your menubar and want to hide some (either totally or behind a button click), Bartender [5]
Readit News
Yet with all of this effort I still went back to linux after a year (Arch with Qtile and Gnome). What really killed macos for me was the fact that animations could not be disabled entirely and everything felt like it's behind several ms of a delay. I work on the move so I don't have the luxury of multi-screen setup so switching between programs, workspaces and windows is the most important part of my workflow - it just drove me nuts.
Now I run simple Lenovo yoga laptop with arch+qtile+gnome and honestly, my performance at work at least doubled. That's my anecdote anyway.
1 - https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai
2 - https://github.com/Granitosaurus/macos-compose
3 - https://github.com/Granitosaurus/choosem
It’s pretty bad when you show everyone enthusiastically that when you open your MacBook it wakes up immediately and actually works. They think you’re insane rather than a former Linux user who has programmed irrational fear that the AMD mobile GPU drivers are going to cause a panic.
Huh, they said they really tried to like macOS for an entire year ...
Then in 2014 I was given the next Macbook Pro at work, and that did not support Linux anymore. Then I got upgraded version in 2019, and that one has even worse support.
During that time I had to get used to macOS, but I simply could not. Those animations or something else make it feel so slow in comparison to Linux desktop.
Then once pandemic hit and I started working from home, I could use my Linux desktop for work. It feels so much better. I am not sure why macOS feels so sluggish in comparison.
Now I am hoping for Asahi Linux to support the new M1 Macbooks well enough to use them on a daily basis, but not sure if it will ever happen. I think the main thing that is missing is the GPU driver. I have not yet seen a good community build open source GPU driver that has decent performance.
interesting, the MBP 2014 is what I will forever remember as "one of the best computer I ran linux on". With archlinux almost everything worked from the very beginning except the webcam driver, and much faster than macOS. It just took some time for Chrome and Firefox to adapt to Retina because those weren't following Xft.dpi system property, but otherwise...
The first thing I do when I get a new Android phone is enabling the developer options and turning off all animations. The phone feels a lot faster then, especially switching apps.
I have more than one friend who I showed this and they suddenly didn't feel the need to replace their phone with a newer, faster one.
Battery life was terrible compared to a Mac (6 hours if I was lucky, barely 4 hours when in video meetings). S3 Suspend worked badly, the battery would drain very quickly. Devices would often not come back after wake (particularly the trackpad). During video meetings, the fans would go into full blast (though they were more quiet than most non-M1 laptops). Noise cancellation was quite bad on Linux (ok-ish in Windows). Lenovo’s own USB-C dock wouldn’t work with 4k@60Hz (works with Windows, Linux misconfigures the lanes and didn’t use HBR3).
It was one of the models that was certified for Linux (IIRC even Fedora). But the whole experience was miserable. I bought an M1 MacBook and didn’t look back.
Dead Comment
- Windows has better Linux support than macOS (WSL gives better integration which means Docker is easier to use compared to Minikube via Hyperkit vm)
- macOS doesn’t have the crucial software I need: FAR Manager
- I’ve had terrible experience with Apple’s customer support in the past where they couldn’t fix broken font antialiasing for external monitors
- I’ve been plagued by serious macOS bugs where it would cause 100% cpu load that could only be cured with closing/reopening the lid, and there are still some sleep-related bugs in it, whereas on Windows everything’s fine
- The window manager in macOS lacks basic features compared to Windows: no tiling, but Windows gets it out of the box with Win+arrows
- All hotkeys on macOS are different from the rest of the world (Windows, Linux) for no good reason and it makes switching between computers very difficult. And no, switching Cmd to Ctrl doesn’t solve it
- Rounded window corners make the first character on the bottom line of terminals unreadable
- GUI feels slow compared to Windows
Originally, Windows followed the IBM CUA [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access] standard, which it still does to a great extent today - Pressing Alt will still activate the menu for instance. In this standard, the cut command was Shift+Del, Copy was Ctrl+Ins and paste was Shift+Ins; which I believe still work as of Windows 10. Microsoft introduced CTRL-Z/X/C/V in Windows 3.1, released in 1992.
In short, the keyboard shortcuts for undo/cut/copy/paste have been constant on the Mac since it’s inception 37 years ago. It’s been “standard” in the Windows world for 29 years
'bit of a duh, that.
> My biggest gripes with macOS, after decades of Windows and Linux: [...] macOS doesn’t have the crucial software I need: FAR Manager
...
FAR doesn't work on linux either, the unofficial linux port (of 2.0) advertises macOS support, and midnight commander works everywhere.
> - The window manager in macOS lacks basic features compared to Windows: no tiling, but Windows gets it out of the box with Win+arrows
BigSur added a tiling system, but it's really just a split-window fullscreen (so you can't have one half of the screen full and the rest mixed-purpose). Much easier to use a tiler like divvy or BetterSnapTool.
Then again I find windows' tiling just as useless as macos' though it's less prescriptive, I use PowerToys' FancyZones there.
> All hotkeys on macOS are different from the rest of the world (Windows, Linux) for no good reason
That's next-level dishonest. There are excellent reasons for it:
1. macos was first
2. macos has always dedicated its own modkey to system-level shortcuts
3. this also makes ctrl and opt (alt) much more regular and convenient
The windows key is a half-assed aping of it.
> And no, switching Cmd to Ctrl doesn’t solve it
There is a reason they’re different, and it’s because those are the shortcuts that macs have used since 1985. It would extremely upsetting to Mac userbase if all of the sudden shortcuts were wincloned.
I also think that most Mac shortcuts make more sense in the modern context; they’re nearly all mnemonic (e.g. Cmd+W to close a window and Cmd+Q to quit) whereas Windows shortcuts are more arbitrary and rooted in limitations of legacy platforms (Alt+F4 doesn’t mean anything to someone new to computers, for instance).
I've never come across this? Do you use some xwindows app that lays characters right on the borders or something?
> Mac os doesn't come with a compose key feature built-in
There is is pretty handy, built-in, text replacement tool.
Settings -> Keyboard -> Text
Here are my top "compose" shortcuts "_shrug -> ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" and "_stare -> ಠ_ಠ" :)
He responded with several follow up questions, but nothing came of it unfortunately… Hopefully it’s on someone’s task list somewhere
My kingdom for a way to cmd-tab through all windows. Truly horrific stuff.
Enjoy!
I actually use it for the opposite function—to make cmd+` better at switching between windows within the same app—but it works great as an alternative cmd+tab if “window switcher” fits your mental model better than “app switcher”.
https://folivora.ai/bettersnaptool
1. Install Yabai
2. install skhd
3. disable SIP (ugh): https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki/Disabling-System-I...
4. add `f13 : yabai -m space --focus prev` and `f14 : yabai -m space --focus next` to your `~/.skhdrc` file.
1 - https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/14001/how-to-turn-...
But lately I felt things have become way too locked down (both hardware and software), too dumbed down (too many apps resemble mobile apps with limited functionality) and too opinionated. Sometimes I just want things differently. Another reason was that many new features are specific to iCloud integration and as I use many OSes (both computer and mobile) I could not take advantage of those anyway. I need cross platform. So a lot of selling points became irrelevant.
I moved to FreeBSD with KDE on top and it felt like a breath of fresh air finally being able to set up my system the way I want it. This is so empowering.
It became my daily driver about a year ago and I haven't looked back though I still use Mac and Windows for work, Windows personally for gaming and Linux for some servers.
Of course I lost some stuff too like Apple's excellent multi DPI and great hardware integration. And many apps that were great like pixelmator. But I gained a lot of configurability and the ability to upgrade my hardware again.
- I had used it until 7.0 in the past and missed the simplicity of having one single platform (rather than Linux with its kernel and the many distributions all doing things differently).
- The excellent handbook
- Almost devoid of corporate influence. Linux is being steered into the warm and fuzzy corporate domain. Many big players try to get their IP adopted by the Linux mainstream. Canonical with Snaps for example, Redhat with Gnome, etc. The big tech players are the biggest kernel contributors now. It moves from choices good for customers to the ones that are good for big tech.
- Non-opinionated platform. Some distros are also becoming quite opinionated like Mac. I did try to play the Apple game for a while (like I said it was my daily driver since 10.2) but they kept annoying me more and more by deprecating things I used. I want choices again.
- Stable platform but with rolling app packages. For example if KDE comes out with a new version I will see it usually a day or 2 later.
- Couldn't find a Linux distro I really liked. I like minimalism but without Arch's elitism. Debian would have been the closest but I have bad experiences with major upgrades. What I would have preferred would be something like Alpine for the desktop. I looked at Adelie Linux which is exactly that but it was too premature.
- The ports tree is really amazing. You're always able to change default package settings and recompile them
- Jails are more powerful than linux containers, though they lack a framework a la docker. This is why I still use Linux on servers.
So this was mainly it :) Unfortuantely running KDE did require installing some linuxisms like Dbus but overall it's not too bad.
And... not modern wifi? I take it you must be on a Desktop in this case?
I'm not a big fan of laptops at all for ergonomics. Most of my systems are desktops, the only laptop I have is a really minimal one for the makerspace (and I have one for work).
I never said it was for everyone by the way. Just that it works for me! In general, things that work for everyone don't tend to work well for me at all, this is my biggest issue with Apple now because they make a product that is ultra-mainstream and very opinionated. You either have to go with the flow (which irritates me) or add a galore of thirdparty addon products to make it work your way which get broken in every major (and often minor) macOS release.
I did try to go the second way for a while but it got too annoying with everything constantly breaking. From reading the article this thread is about, I see the author is going the same way (lots of addon products) and I wonder if they will also be caught by this in the future.
All corporations strive to fragment the market using non-compatible technologies and then to monopolize the market by consuming other fragments.
This strategy failed in the 90s with the arrival of Linux. Although many times I felt like the whole world will become Microsoft/Wintel, I think we barely missed.
Now, corporations are trying to do it e.g. via forcing everybody into the cloud and killing open protocols. E.g. I have several email accounts and I can't gather mail from all of my mailboxes in one application. Situation is even worse with Calendars. I have two jobs and also my own personal calendar server and I can't collect all my calendars in one app also. I have to routinely check Google Calendar, because even though I can add it to my Thunderbird Calendar, moved or canceled events changes are not propagating to Thunderbird. And I can't integrate Microsoft Outlook calendar into my Thunderbird at all.
I really don't want to rely on whims of one corporation. Also, regarding MacBooks: I remember when the touchbar had no alternatives and it is really awful. This is what monopoly means: you have to live with bad decisions. You have to pay absurd money for a piece of cloth or a roller for the desktop case.
Happily donated to the author of an app so essential for my day to day productivity to show my gratitude for making it and making it open source. If the author happens to read this: thank you!
All tied to global keyboard shortcuts too. Free, open source, and does exactly what you've asked for.
After getting into professional dev during / after high school I ended up using Divvy for an OSX window manager. It wasn’t fantastic, but I could set up custom keybinds and it was “reminiscent” of those tiling WMs I found so much love for as a pre-adolescent.
I recently (2ish years ago) switched from mac to a Debian then eventually Pop OS setup for my daily driver development environment. While not as robust as a custom arch setup with a tiling WM like awesome, Mutter is quite good and everything PopOS offers out of the box has been fantastic. Perhaps one of these days I will find the time to dive back into arch and configure a _truly_ efficient and customized workstation / dev env :-)
It’s interesting to see all of these alternative, perhaps even _better_ / more robust / more FOSS friendly mac WMs being listed here. I’m keen on giving them a try whenever I end up back on a mac workstation, but I cannot deny that my Divvy lifetime license has served me incredibly well for years, with support through many big OS upgrades.
I switched to it after having some issues with rectangle sending some of my windows into the abyss (way outside of the screen) which forced me to kill the app and restart it to get it back. But if Rectangle works for you that's good too, it's probably easier to configure.
I've been using TotalSpaces 2 (https://blog.binaryage.com/totalfinder-totalspaces-future/) to change workspaces in macOS without the annoying animation which you cannot disable.
Too bad TotalSpaces 2 does not work with Monterey or M1 macs, so I am really looking for another solution that can enable this. I used to run skhd + yabai, but something about that did not click as good as with TotalSpaces 2.
Anybody know a solution for Monterey & M1 that you can use to switch between workspaces with the keyboard, without any delay ?
They are the best window managers I've used on MacOS, because the resize features work flawlessly every single time. Other ones I've tried (e.g. bettertouchtool) have occasional issues with that.
They'd be perfect if they supported full customization of drop zones. They have some limited customization, including via the command line, but it's nothing compared to some of the other apps that are out there.
The custom shortcuts in Hookshot are beyond what I've seen in most apps, especially since you can customize what happens in repeated executions of the custom shortcuts. Let me know what other apps out there have the customization that you are referring to.
https://ianyh.com/amethyst/
Disclaimer: I made this.
https://ianyh.com/amethyst/
Deleted Comment
hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "alt", "ctrl", "shift"}, "F",
function() hs.application.launchOrFocus("iTerm") end)
I also use Karabiner-Elements to change capslock to cmd, alt, ctrl, shift.
I moved to tmux + Alacritty [1] (Rust hype and speeed) which is cross-platform and only needs its config file, a nice and clean yaml, in the right place to restore it as I want. Now when I full wipe my Mac I just need to run the script that pulls the config file from GitHub and tada! Also, the configuration file is almost identical to my Linux one so I can move around similarly and have a consistent look.
I'm also used to replace macOS programs like `sed`,`grep`,`getopt`,`ssh` (macOS OpenBSD one won't work with Yubikey),`coreutils` and `awk` with the GNU version. You can download them with Homebrew and to replace them with the macOS default ones you just need to put them at the beginning of your path like this:
[1]: https://github.com/alacritty/alacrittyPreferences > General > Preferences > Load preferences from a custom folder or URL
You can save your preferences and load them as required.
I have set PREFIX to be ctrl-a, which mimics GNU screen.
'Ctrl-a m' toggles "mouse" mode, which allows you to resize windows and set focus with the mouse.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jftuga/universe/master/tmu...
However now that I don’t daily drive mac as much, I’ve defaulted back to iTerm 2 for when I do happen to be doing something on my mac. The default configuration is quite good out of the box. All I really need to do post-install is get my beloved zsh + ohmyzsh plug-ins and I’m good to go :-)
And also my tmux dot files ;)
https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/
Like holy crap, it's a very well written and well thought out piece of software. And it's fast. I'm all about the Rust hype, but Kitty reduced latency drastically.
There's even a system wide equivalent at /Library/Preferences
The only downside after two years of using Hammerspoon is that the community is small since it isn't as user-friendly as yabai, amethyst, etc. However, you'll probably enjoy its open-ended nature, given your article.
[1] https://github.com/Hammerspoon/hammerspoon
I try and lean into the philosophy of the mac, which is that its a desktop which behaves like a real desk. Right now I have 15 windows from various applications open on this one desktop, and its in a giant pile just as if I had a bunch of papers and files in a messy pile on my desk. This works great because you can press a button or swipe along the trackpad and spread out this pile, exposing everything that's in it along with all your other desktops, as if you are spreading out the stacks of papers on your desk.
IMO this method is how you focus on stuff anyway. Your eyes aren't looking at the 12 different things in your tiling window manager at once, so you might as well just have a few things pulled up on top of your pile of windows that are of focus and take advantage of your screen real estate rather than have a bunch of tiny panes artfully spaced. The mouse makes it easy to do fast and sloppy window adjustments which are good enough.
Now any clean VM or freshly installed machine or borrowed computer at work is set up to my preference. Do I maximize my productivity or have everything exactly perfect? No. But I'd rather have my nails pulled out than tweaking things. If I have to edit a configuration textfile, the computer goes out the window. My OS isn't an important part of my workday. It should just start my IDE and get out of the way.
- On iTerm2 you can setup a system wide hotkey to toggle a floating terminal in front of all your windows, whatever you're doing [1]. This works even in full screen apps. It really changed my workflow with iTerm, and is really handy.
- For system stats in the menubar, I really recommend iStat Menu [2]. It's paid (12$ for a license), but the quality of the graphs and interface makes it well worth it imo.
- If you have an external display and want to precisely tweek your resolution, I recommend SWitchResX [3]. It's mostly a GUI that wraps some display CLI tools. With it I adjust the resolution of my 4k external monitor currently, running it at 3200x1800 with HiDPI, and adjust it based on my eye fatigue.
- As a more powerful and versatile replacement to Spotlight (Cmd+Space), Alfred [4]. You can customize it to run anything you want, from converting timestamps to dates, opening apps, search the whole system, run scripts, etc
- If you have too many icons in your menubar and want to hide some (either totally or behind a button click), Bartender [5]
[1]: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/48796/iterm-as-a-s...
[2]: https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/
[3]: https://www.madrau.com/
[4]: https://www.alfredapp.com/
[5]: https://www.macbartender.com/
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hidden-bar/id1452453066?mt=12