alt Hacker NewsThe struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe
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I have been using Moom for a long time for especially two things:
- moving windows without holding from any particular position
- resizing windows without grabbing a particular corner
Life changing small things.
All that 'glass' eye candy is a sheer sign that looks is more important to Apple than usability. And I don't even care for how it looks.
I game on windows because of anti cheat software requirements. Windows is garbage. The windows + tab order is never consistent. Not having a good built in shell and don't get me started if you ever have to edit the registry for anything. Super poor experience.
I haven’t had to move the mouse near a window corner to resize it in years — I just hold down the Shift and Fn keys and the window under my mouse resizes as I move it. Strongly recommend getting BetterTouchTool for this - changed my life.
That's genuine 2000s Linux experience there. Ironic that these days Linux provides a more refined and consistent UX than both MacOS and Windows.
Its not a great update and hopefully with Dye out they will make some changes, but personally I don't have this issue.
Just this week it also dawned on me the impracticality of the large corners after twice in a row failing to grab the corner of a window. Tahoe is absolute amateur hour.
Seems very clear now that we are going to see touch screen MacBooks. Which is a very silly idea. But explains why the UI "snaps" like an iPad, and everything is designed for touch.
I just saw the upgrade notification and thought to myself "no, thank you".
Still running Sonoma on my MBP and iOS17 on my phone.
Unrelated but iOS 26 is so bad and janky that I've finally decided to switch to an android phone. I hate it so much. Thank god I haven't upgraded to Tahoe.
Question for people who have installed Tahoe. Of the regions in the article, which bring window focus / key window? Is it area clipped to the round rect? Or is it similarly weird?
If there was a background window in that area outside the corner, would it receive the click event?
Who asked for those rounded windows anyway? They create so many problems; every app has its own border-radius, and it wastes precious screen space...
Stop using MacOS?
Apple's window management has always sucked, with the absurdly crippled resizing being a longstanding embarrassment.
Into the 2000s, the only way you could resize a window on the Mac was to drag its lower-right corner. That is it. NO other corner, and no edge. So if the lower-right corner happened to be off-screen because the window was bigger than the screen, you were kind of screwed. You had to fiddle with the maximize & restore gumdrops to trick the OS into resizing the window to make that ONE corner accessible. Then you had to move the corner, then roll all the way up to the title bar and move the window, then roll back down to the corner... until you had the window sized and positioned as you wanted.
When Apple grudgingly added proper window-resizing, it made it as obscure as possible. Since Apple remains ignorant of the value of window FRAMES, there is no obvious zone within which the resizing cursor should take effect. There is no visual target for the user. This has always made an important and fundamental part of a windowed GUI a ridiculous pain in the ass on Macs.
And as the author here notes, it has gotten even worse. Not only will the window often refuse to resize, but you'll wind up activating whatever app lies behind the window you're trying to resize... hiding the one you were dealing with.
> Since upgrading to macOS Tahoe, I’ve noticed that quite often my attempts to resize a window are failing.
That should nudge users away from this rather primitive method of window resizing using tiny 19px corners and instead set up a productivity app where your can use the full 33% of the window size (so conveniently huge! and of course customizable) to resize via an extra trigger (for example, using a modifier key)
(nice plate picture joke!)
It's obvious, the new Apple UI (and Liquid Glass) is optimized for visionOS, not macOS or iOS.
The curves are a lie, the window is still square, can we stop putting lipstick on the pig, I just want my computers to work not look like some computer in a sci-fi movie.
The era of Apple design with great care to little details is long gone.
I'm on macOS 15.4 on a 2021 M1 Max. I haven't rebooted for months.
Is it possible for me to update to whatever was released just before "Tahoe", or will it just put me on that now?
Windows is following the same path. In both it’s getting harder and harder to tell the window boundary and where to drag it resize.
I've noticed this as well and it's infuriating. It's extremely unintuitive and I constantly find myself missing the resize zone.
This 100%
Please please please make this better Apple. Or just give us an option for square windows.
I’ve been more and more confused by Apple’s product positioning for MacOS. They still have a sizeable “pro” market that spans across a very aspirational set of careers: Film, YouTubers, developers, photographers, artists, musicians, etc.
Considering how many people only buy a MacBook PRO no matter what they plan on doing with it, they really need to keep the actual salary-earning pros happy with it or else it’ll lose all credibility. A Mac in a recording booth has a look to it that sells well, but that aesthetic won’t last if you stop seeing them. Being an effective tool for the pro minority should honestly be the priority for MacOS, even at the cost of making it incongruous from iPadOS/iOS. *
* disclaimer: what do I know honestly haha, I’m sure they’ll print money anyway.
Idk. I don’t resize windows with the mouse at all. I use the key bindings to move to a tile position or fill screen.
I almost always never use a mouse for more than maybe moving a tab to another window.
So I am wondering, are people fighting using a Mac in the most effective way simply because of old patterns and habits?
Not updating to Tahoe and hoping they make a major change for whatever is next. My M1 is getting a bit long in the tooth, and was thinking about upgrading to an M5, but not if it comes with Tahoe.
That omelette does look delicious though.
Steve Jobs would never have let this ship.
Those big radius borders are a waste of space just for the sake of fashion. Form follows function not the other way around.
i mean the The cursor changes to the resize cursor when its available. Not really sure what this article is complaining about.
Tahoe is a nightmare. I’m Literally not buying a new Mac because of it.
Dye destroyed macOS. I don’t know what they do, but they have to backtrack.
I started with an Apple Lisa. I’ve never enjoyed Apple products less than I do right now. And there were some rough days in the 90s! I switched from a AW Ultra 3 to a Garmin. Considering an S26 because of the semi-matte screen. The Mac, though, I probably can’t replace, but man Tahoe/Liquid Glass sucks.
I would highly recommend Magnets to anyone users who prefer shortcuts anyway: https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/
I don’t have this issue at all. I have a very generous amount of space to grab the corner with and it changes mouse pointer to the diagonal arrow.
Edit: despite all the negative feedback, I’m quite happy with Tahoe and I enjoy the visual changes. I think some of the subtler changes is more intuitive and Spotlight’s improvement is quite nice.
Let's be honest, everything windows on macOS is and always has been an utter cluster fuck.
the macOS window manager has been awful for many years
I agree it makes using my computer worse, but I'd like to see how far Apple is willing to go here.
They won't do perfectly circular windows, that would be crazy— but I think we all know they can go further than this.
From "Safari 15 on Mac OS, a user interface mess" https://morrick.me/archives/9368 from 5 years ago:
--- start quote ---
The utter user-interface butchery happening to Safari on the Mac is once again the work of people who put iOS first. People who by now think in iOS terms. People who view the venerable Mac OS user interface as an older person whose traits must be experimented upon, plastic surgery after plastic surgery, until this person looks younger. Unfortunately the effect is more like this person ends up looking… weird.
These people look at the Mac’s UI and (that’s the impression, at least) don’t really understand it. Its foundations come from a past that almost seems inscrutable to them. Usability cues and features are all wrinkles to them. iOS and iPadOS don’t have these strange wrinkles, they muse. We must hide them. We’ll make this spectacular facelift and we’ll hide them, one by one. Mac OS will look as young (and foolish, cough) as iOS!
--- end quote ---
At the time it was only Safari that they wanted to "modernize". Now it's the full OS.
I find MacOS terrible (any version) and wish my employer would not force Mac upon me. I hope one day we will be able to use Linux on Mac hardware (in enterprise setting).
I will never update to tahoe. if it becomes forced I'll switch to linux idgaf
Another thing to add to the list of reasons why I'm not upgrading.
Imagine Steve Jobs allowing this to happen.
>Living on this planet for quite a few decades, I have learned that it rarely works to grab things if you don’t actually touch them:
Yes, but that is skeuomorphic design, which is old and ugly. We live in the era of anti-skeuomorphic design, where nothing makes any sense but it looks sleek.
This is so simple.
This makes me angry.
[dead]
I noticed this and modified the .car to just make window corners sharp. It looks a bit jarring, but functionally speaking, it feels like a big improvement.