I enable tap to click on those "diving board" style touchpads if I'm going to be using the system for long stretches without a mouse - the amount of force needed and top-to-bottom variability of the diving board drives me nuts. I'd definitely rather have a modern haptic trackpad though.
I never found the diving boards bad, but I think that is due to starting to use trackpads back when they had physical buttons under them, and I never changed my technique. I use my index finger to move around, and my thumb hangs out near the bottom of the pad for when I need to click.
I’m not sure how else I’d do things like a click and drag operation. The whole double tap and drag thing always seemed pretty error prone for me.
I just tried to enable it for 10 minutes and I will never enable it again. This is also a reason why I can not work on non mac laptop trackpads - they are unreliable, accident taps happens all the time.
My main browsers are Safari and Brave. Then Chrome for google stuff only. Then Edge. Then Firefox.
I was a primary Firefox for many years and finally gave up about 3-4 years ago when it just got too bloaty and buggy to bother. This might have been when I discovered Brave, but not sure.
job mandates a macbook, had no choice besides changing the job, which I will do later.
one thing bugs me the most, as a linux user, is that copy and paste by mouse middle button, now I have to use mouse to select it, then cmd+v to paste it, what a hassle.
of course I changed that scroll down instead of scroll up thing, I don't want to move up the bar to move down the page, that's just odd.
click to close windows does not really close the apps also bothers me.
Apple is such a closed company nowadays, worse than Microsoft from the past in fact, made me hard to love it, thus those nitpicks becomes issues for me.
Some people just want things to work the way they're used to. I'm one of those people, I find it rather annoying to deal with the windowing paradigm used in (most) Linux windows managers and Windows itself. So I'm not surprised when I see it in the other direction.
I do wish it were possible to set up a macOS-flavored version of focus follows mouse, though. It would have to be adapted to the windowing paradigm, but I have some notes on how it could work. I don't expect Apple will ever add it and it would require deep hooks into many parts of the OS to offer it as an extension, so that's that. There's no perfect software, the only question is what you can live with out of the available options.
On Windows/Linux closing an app requires doing the obvious thing. Press the big X, you’re done. You’re back to the previous app instantly.
On Mac after closing a window what you see on the screen is a lie (besides the ever subtle menu bar and shades of gray); you’re still in the visually-hidden app.
> Apple is such a closed company nowadays, worse than Microsoft from the past in fact
I think that's debatable, the 90's were awful and nothing Apple does right now has the kind of platform dominance MS did. At the height of IE6's reign, there were whole areas of commerce and interaction that could only be done on a Windows machine.
But they're clearly moving in that direction. As we saw two days ago w/r/t the DMA evasion nonsense in Europe, Apple is now willing to pull the same kind of tricks MS was: like killing off browser-based apps (!) to force people onto its proprietary stack.
There's a thread down below about how Safari is better than Chrome. And it might be, but it's clear that from Cook's perspectives standard browsers are ejectable the second you can get people hooked on MacOS/iOS apps.
The window vs. app distinction is pretty easy to smooth over, just sub out ⌘Q for ⌘W so you’re quitting instead of closing windows.
The extra layer of grouping can actually be pretty nice at times, since it allows the user to for example close or minimize/restore all windows of an application across all monitors and virtual desktops at once, but it does take a bit of a different mental model.
...until you need to close a Finder window and you need to remember to use ⌘W because that can't be quit. Then you need to make sure to ⌘-tab past Finder because it will hang around near the top of recent apps until you've switched to enough other apps to push it to the bottom of the list.
If anyone has a way around this I'd love to hear it, but I think it's basically a side effect of apps being allowed to be open without a window and Finder always needing to run, so seems like an inherent part of the MacOS experience.
> of course I changed that scroll down instead of scroll up thing, I don't want to move up the bar to move down the page, that's just odd.
That's because the scrolling behavior with the mouse is annoyingly tied to the scrolling behavior of the trackpad, where the "natural scrolling" makes sense as a default because it's like you're moving the page up (similar to a phone) with two fingers rather than scrolling.
I hate having to constantly change it in the settings as I'm switching between trackpad and mouse. The settings need to be separated. Just let me have natural scrolling with the trackpad and regular scrolling when I'm using a mouse without needing to open the damn settings app.
The maximised window behaviour is the thing that bugs me the most as a primarily Linux user lumbered with a work-Mac. It's so weird to treat that as being on a different virtual desktop. Better than the Lion days when your second monitor could only show "brushed steel" if you had an app maximised, but not by much.
I use Moom, so maximizing a window without setting it to its own space is ctrl-cmd-z-space. Moom does a lot more than that, it's worth checking out, especially if you plug into external monitors as part of your workflow.
With that setup, I'm quite content with full screen putting the window in its own space. It's an affordance I use fairly frequently, in fact. Just not as often as maximizing the window within the space it already inhabits.
Double-clicking the titlebar should yield a more traditional maximize behavior, except in non-native apps which don’t replicate full native titlebar functionality. For those hovering over the green button with option pressed will show an option for traditional maximize.
For single window apps it makes sense that closing the window also quits the app. For apps that can have multiple windows I suppose it would make sense for the app to quit when the last window is closed, but that seems less obvious that it should, somehow. One reason: The app might open with no windows, waiting for the user to open a file or something.
I only use a Mac for work through a company laptop but one thing I recently discovered is the world clock widget which is accessed through your clock.
You can show up to 4 different times besides your local time.
This is really handy to see the time in UTC and other timezones where some of your team mates might exist. This saves having to Google for timezone converters.
It is unbelievable how bad window management is at macos.
Specially if you use multiple desktops it's impossible to not kill your workflow with the inconcistencies. You press a dock icon and you have no clue if it will open a new window in the current desktop or if it will switch to another desktop and show you an already open window.
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a program that opens a new window when other windows are already open on some other desktop/monitor. The behavior I always see is switching to the desktop with the window, with multiple dock icon clicks cycling through each desktop that program has windows on.
My window management style changes completely when I switch operating systems - on Windows I use the taskbar (with actual named windows, not just the default icons), because the desktop switching and "overview"/view all windows feature are atrociously laggy. On Mac and Linux (Gnome), as you say, the dock is useless for finding your windows so I make extensive use of desktops and the overview, which both perform flawlessly.
I used to have fancy long config files full of default writes, but every MacOS update changes so many things that it’s borderline stressful to run the file ever again. Things break in weird ways. The config ends up only being useful for the one time I setup this machine, and not the next.
So my new approach: an Apple note where I just write down any settings I tweak manually in UI. If they ever relocate, I will find them in another place. I also write down any custom setup I do (like cron, etc).
I also keep an iCloud dir of various software configs, and a Brewfile for all the software installs. I haven’t tried transitioning from this setup yet, but hopefully it’s much more straightforward, albeit a bit time consuming (it’s always time consuming).
Just a shout out to nix-darwin[1]. It is nix, so initial setup is a bit involved. But then it truly makes it easy to configure everything in one place including mac defaults, homebrew apps declaratively and mas apps etc.
(If anyone knows how to show bluetooth in top menu all the time on Sonoma I'd love to learn - haven't done much investigation but option seems to have disappeared in the UI...)
I was so glad to remove all that (and to a lesser extent, trying to maintain both Homebrew package names and pacman/AUR names for everything, which obviously sometimes differ or need a different thing anyway) when I started using a Linux machine for work (already did personally). That might change again unfortunately; I'm hoping some day Nix or something like it is a cross-platform solution, but I don't think it's there yet. Discovering the `defaults` options (or worse: what you're setting that no longer does anything) is a nightmare.
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We are very different people. Tap to click is the bane of my existence. I can’t work on a system that has that enabled.
I’m not sure how else I’d do things like a click and drag operation. The whole double tap and drag thing always seemed pretty error prone for me.
I primarily develop and use Firefox. Rarely is a cross-browser compat issue reported, but if it does that we can test + fix on the go.
My main browsers are Safari and Brave. Then Chrome for google stuff only. Then Edge. Then Firefox.
I was a primary Firefox for many years and finally gave up about 3-4 years ago when it just got too bloaty and buggy to bother. This might have been when I discovered Brave, but not sure.
Anyway, Edge didn’t seem so weird to me at all.
one thing bugs me the most, as a linux user, is that copy and paste by mouse middle button, now I have to use mouse to select it, then cmd+v to paste it, what a hassle.
of course I changed that scroll down instead of scroll up thing, I don't want to move up the bar to move down the page, that's just odd.
click to close windows does not really close the apps also bothers me.
Apple is such a closed company nowadays, worse than Microsoft from the past in fact, made me hard to love it, thus those nitpicks becomes issues for me.
This may be true. But Windows is so absolutely horrible with ads and stupid bloat.
Even my work windows instance defaults to showing Kardashian/politics “news” on new tabs. My home windows instance has so much garbage installed.
Maybe Microsoft is more “open” but their design is poor and anti-user. I’ll settle for Apple being closed and user focused every day.
Of course, I’d really love a Linux laptop with the price and usability of Apple hardware, but I’ve been wanting that for 25 years.
I do wish it were possible to set up a macOS-flavored version of focus follows mouse, though. It would have to be adapted to the windowing paradigm, but I have some notes on how it could work. I don't expect Apple will ever add it and it would require deep hooks into many parts of the OS to offer it as an extension, so that's that. There's no perfect software, the only question is what you can live with out of the available options.
On Windows/Linux closing an app requires doing the obvious thing. Press the big X, you’re done. You’re back to the previous app instantly.
On Mac after closing a window what you see on the screen is a lie (besides the ever subtle menu bar and shades of gray); you’re still in the visually-hidden app.
Calendars, emails, chats that need to run headless in the background live naturally on the top menu bar.
And please spare us from "I want it to open fast". This should not be a user concern, the system should be smart enough to cache frequently used apps.
I think that's debatable, the 90's were awful and nothing Apple does right now has the kind of platform dominance MS did. At the height of IE6's reign, there were whole areas of commerce and interaction that could only be done on a Windows machine.
But they're clearly moving in that direction. As we saw two days ago w/r/t the DMA evasion nonsense in Europe, Apple is now willing to pull the same kind of tricks MS was: like killing off browser-based apps (!) to force people onto its proprietary stack.
There's a thread down below about how Safari is better than Chrome. And it might be, but it's clear that from Cook's perspectives standard browsers are ejectable the second you can get people hooked on MacOS/iOS apps.
The extra layer of grouping can actually be pretty nice at times, since it allows the user to for example close or minimize/restore all windows of an application across all monitors and virtual desktops at once, but it does take a bit of a different mental model.
I disable it / remap it somewhere in System Settings.
If anyone has a way around this I'd love to hear it, but I think it's basically a side effect of apps being allowed to be open without a window and Finder always needing to run, so seems like an inherent part of the MacOS experience.
That's because the scrolling behavior with the mouse is annoyingly tied to the scrolling behavior of the trackpad, where the "natural scrolling" makes sense as a default because it's like you're moving the page up (similar to a phone) with two fingers rather than scrolling.
I hate having to constantly change it in the settings as I'm switching between trackpad and mouse. The settings need to be separated. Just let me have natural scrolling with the trackpad and regular scrolling when I'm using a mouse without needing to open the damn settings app.
Not sure why we need a separate app for this, but it does work.
With that setup, I'm quite content with full screen putting the window in its own space. It's an affordance I use fairly frequently, in fact. Just not as often as maximizing the window within the space it already inhabits.
It closes App Store and System Settings. I wonder why they operate differently.
You can show up to 4 different times besides your local time.
This is really handy to see the time in UTC and other timezones where some of your team mates might exist. This saves having to Google for timezone converters.
I like the easy access of it, just click your clock and boom in 1 second you have instant access to these.
I even ordered mine based on relative closeness to my time. For example:
My local time is EST.
The extra 4 clock widget has UTC, Poland, India and Australia which are all +X hours ahead of EST in that order.
Site: https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/
Features: https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/features
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.helloka.wo...
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/time-buddy-easy-time-zones/id7...
And easy to add to your web site:
https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/clock-widget
Specially if you use multiple desktops it's impossible to not kill your workflow with the inconcistencies. You press a dock icon and you have no clue if it will open a new window in the current desktop or if it will switch to another desktop and show you an already open window.
It shows me all open Windows and in which Desktop, in its Sidebar (I've disabled the macOS dock.)
Also the Cmd-Tab functionalities are nice, and i can use "Fn + [a single key] " shortcut to focus an app.
Would recommend.
[1] https://contexts.co/
Thank you so much internet stranger!
It just tells you that it has a program in memory, like it can help my workflow.
Dock in macos is a useless process manager, not a taskbar.
Dead Comment
So my new approach: an Apple note where I just write down any settings I tweak manually in UI. If they ever relocate, I will find them in another place. I also write down any custom setup I do (like cron, etc).
I also keep an iCloud dir of various software configs, and a Brewfile for all the software installs. I haven’t tried transitioning from this setup yet, but hopefully it’s much more straightforward, albeit a bit time consuming (it’s always time consuming).
There is a sample config in nix-darwin repo[2].
[1] https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin
[2] https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin/blob/master/modules/examp...
[1]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/managing-dotfiles-on-windows-11-...
My current setup here in case useful to anyone: https://gist.github.com/dbuxton/3ccdfd88b05e1f2807c05fe32f50...
(If anyone knows how to show bluetooth in top menu all the time on Sonoma I'd love to learn - haven't done much investigation but option seems to have disappeared in the UI...)