> it feels like Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle

IMO, this has been their assumption for years, and it actually turned me off when I tried getting used to Mac circa 2006-2007. Coming from Windows at the time, I just couldn't get over a weird anxiety that my application window wasn't maximized, because it didn't look like it completely snapped into the screen corners.

Now, using 34-inch ultrawide monitors almost exclusively, I never maximize anything... it'd be unusable.

“Maximising” windows full screen, apart from the genuinely-full-screen-takeover mode you can put windows in (where they take a virtual desktop slot too) has never been an idiomatic part of the Macintosh UI, since the beginning. The “zoom” button traditionally meant “toggle between a user defined window size, and a size that is just big enough to avoid scroll bars appearing, where possible”. It goes back to the spatial desktop metaphor.

Personally I try and work with that as much as possible, though it’s not always ideal.

macOS only recently got an option to make windows fill the screen. For most of history what most people would assume is a maximize button (the green one) was actually a zoom button. It sized the window to what the OS thought was appropriate for the content (to the best of my knowledge and experience with it).

Apple then made things go full screen, but in a special full screen mode, so macOS worked more like the iPad.

By the time they added a way to maximize windows in the way Windows does, the idea of maximizing an app has largely worked its way out of my workflow. It was always too much trouble, and I find very few apps where it provides much benefit. Web browsers, for example, often end up with a lot of useless whitespace on the sides of the page, so they work better as a smaller window on a widescreen display. In an IDE, it really depends on what’s being worked on and if text wrapping is something I want. Ideally lines wouldn’t get so long that this is a problem.

With the way macOS manages windows, I often find it easiest to have my windows mostly overlapped with various corners poking out, so I can move between app windows in one click. The alternative is bringing every window of an app to the front (with the Dock or cmd+tab), or using Mission Control for everything, neither of which feels efficient.

I could install some 3rd party window management utility, I suppose, but in the long run, it felt easier to just figure out a workflow that works on the stock OS, so I can use any system without going through a setup process to customize everything. It’s the same reason I never seriously got into alternative keyboard layouts.

Just wanted to note that this is how I work. I rarely have any window full screen/maximized and hate it when a website or application is built assuming a giant monitor with a maximized window.

I’ve never found a setup with multiple desktops or similar with a way to quickly switch between apps I’m using more than “editor slightly more left, browser slightly more right, …” and just clicking on a border I know brings that app to the front. I’m sure many think I’m crazy. That’s ok. :)

That said, I generally hate the new OSX UI. Every UI element that is non usable just became larger and wastes space I should be able to utilize. Likewise, it made some operations insanely frustrating (here’s looking at you, corner drag resize!).

Probably not the norm, but I use a large 4K monitor and no scaling.

I haven’t maximized a window in years. They look ridiculous like that. Especially web pages with their max width set so the content is 1/4 the screen and 3/4 whitespace.

I've seen half a dozen Mac users and none of them maximized the window very often. They usually had a mishmash of like 12 windows open and randomly all over the screen. Then they used the Alt-Tab to get between them. Basically wherever it opened is where it stayed.

> Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle

The assumption is that the window should be the size of the content of the document inside.

It turns out that this approach works well for many applications, especially what the mac was designed for in the 80s and 90s. And it's horrid for modern "pro" applications.

Yes! After many years of using only linux or windows machines, I was assigned an iMac at an internship and noticed the friction with fullscreening things. I decided not to fight it and spent the next year happily working in little windows and making frequent use of the "mission control" gesture.

However, after the internship I went right back to fullscreen/window tiling in linux, so I can't say I really preferred it. Even now as a Gnome user with a big monitor and magic trackpad on my desk - which gives me ~equal access to either approach - I fullscreen everything.

I almost never use full screen windows on a Mac. Things like video are full screen, but that's a swipe to another workspace. Half-screen windows on a 27" screen are already bigger than a sheet of letter paper. Lots happens in terminal windows, which vary a bit, but are usually around 100x60, and maybe 1/6 of the screen.

I do have Rectangle installed, so apps generally get at most the left or right half of the screen, with a shortcut for badly behaved websites that need 2/3 to look right. Apps are usually pretty good about remembering window positions, so mostly you futz with it once and you're done.

I use Rectangle [1] for window management. I only use three shortcuts: full screen, left half of the screen, and right half of the screen. My editors and Chrome are always running in one of these modes.

But for other apps where interactions tend to be brief like Finder, Messages, Notes, Music, etc - yeah I don't usually expand them to full screen.

[1] https://rectangleapp.com/

I know lots of people on laptop screens who don't maximize windows. It seems weird to me to only use like 80% of the screen's real estate, but sure, whatever.

On large external monitors, I think it makes total sense not to have every window maximized, though. Probably less usable that way.

Yeah this is the assumption, even pre-OSX. I won't claim to know the majority of mac users, especially not since the large uptick in the 2010's... but it seems, in my experience, very much the norm to not maximize windows and I wouldn't be surprised if people who do maximize are mostly Windows converts (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Actually yes, I have all windows overlapping and none expanded to fill the screen, unless I'm really doing something very specific that needs as much space as possible. But the rounded edges are still slightly annoying.

It’s painful for me to watch senior engineers drag windows around and resize, hunt and peck for what they’re looking for. I suppose that’s what an emacs user may think of me when I move code around, but I suppose such things aren’t critical for overall productivity

Yes, all the time. I understand that if you have a setup where you do everything in your IDE you could reasonably leave it full screen all the time and I get why that works for some people. I'm not one of those folks and I use separate IDE, terminal, browsers, and other windows and use window management to allow myself to see multiple of them at the same time and switch between them by clicking on what I want.

Also just want to be 100% clear: Tahoe is bad and I hate the changes and I don't think the OS should prefer one way of working over the other. I just hope it's helpful to explain my perspective.

I never understood running apps in full screen. Unless it's an IDE, Video Editor, or some other app with tools filling all nooks and crannies, I want windows that fit the content. I don't want to launch a text or document editor in full screen, read a PDF in full screen. Typically I don't even want to watch a video full screen. I also generally don't want tiling. I want to arrange windows with parts peeking out behind other windows to reference while I'm working on something else. I want some sense of "space" related to where I left a window.

I've always disliked MacOS because it is so janky about maximizing windows.

I have a 39" ultrawide and I keep every window maximized. I have OCD about this. I can't stand things all layered on top of each other. I like to focus on one screen at a time.

Chromium browsers have been rolling out split tabs and I use that on a couple of tasks where I'm constantly cutting/pasting between sites, but that's about it.

I never have any window in the fullscreen/maximized mode. Some are pretty large, such as IDE, and they sometimes touch one or more edges of the screen/dock/panel, but never occupy the entire space. That was true even on my 14in MacBook with 125% DPI.

That said, I am a huge fan of manual window management.

When I'm using my macbook's screen, I usually expand a browser window to fill the whole screen -- it's a 13" screen so not using the whole thing makes things feel small. But most of the time my computer is plugged into an larger external monitor (20-something inches, maybe 27?), and there I don't expand any windows to fill the whole screen. I like having separate not-full-screen windows which partially (or mostly) overlap.

Somewhat relatedly, we use Windows at work, and it drives me crazy when I hop on a computer after someone's been using it and they have every single thing maximized, even Windows Explorer, on 27" monitors. A maximized browser, I get... I don't do it myself but I understand how it can be useful, but maximizing Windows Explorer is just insane to me, and yet a lot of my coworkers do it.

A lot of it is just old Mac UI dogma. On a multi-monitor or ultrawide desk the default behavior still acts like everyone wants a few polite little windows drifting in the middle, so browsers, IDEs, and other dense apps start half-crippled until you drag everything into place by hand. Apple seems weirdly attached to the idea that the desktop should feel like an oversized tablet, and it's anoying.

It depends very much on the size of the screen. On a small 13” laptop screen? Sure, you’re going to be running apps full-screen a lot of the time. On a big desktop monitor? No, except for games and playing movies, I’ll almost never expand an app to fill the entire screen.

I almost never expand an application to be full-screen, even on my laptop. This despite the fact that I'll resize an application's window to fill the whole screen except for the dock. I think that's why I don't maximize it: I want the dock to remain accessible.

A lot of stupid things about Mac window management stems from the mistake of forcing all applications to share a single menu that's glued to the top of the screen. This essentially turns your entire desktop into ONE application's window, within which its actual windows float around.

Historically this led to the Mac's penchant for apps that spawned an irritating flotilla of windows that you had to herd around your screen. Not only did this deny users a way to minimize the whole app at once, but it also sucked because you could see everything on your desktop (or other apps' UIs) THROUGH the UI of the application you were trying to use. A dysfunctional mess.

Around 15 years ago, I estimate, the huge advantage of a single application window finally permeated the Apple mindset and things have gotten much better in that regard. But Apple should have abandoned the single menu in the transition to OS X, and put menus where they belong: on applications' main frames. That would make the desktop a truly unlimited workspace and eliminate the daily irritation of the menu changes its contents behind the user's back because he clicked on another application's window (perhaps to move it).

Multiple times a day I minimize an application and then attempt to do something in the application that's now filling the screen... only to find that the menu still belongs to the application that isn't even shown. It's just so dumb.

But then... this is the GUI that, for decades, would only let you resize windows from ONE corner and NO edges. Apple grudgingly, half-assedly, and unreliably addressed that in the 2000s, only now to make it even less reliable in the shambolic Tahoe UI.

I rarely run my apps fullscreen. It's because I have multiple 4k monitors connected to the machine. Using an app even chrome or an IDE fullscreen would be too big.

But do use apps fullscreen when Im traveling. The laptop screen is too small to use chrome or vscode any other way.

It’s very rare that I maximize an application. I’m always stacking. However, I don’t think it’s an optimizing assumption: I am frequently fighting with the window manager as I rearrange my windows and it automatically maximizes them because I got too close to an edge of the screen

In general my browser is dead center or slightly to the right so I can access my other windows (terminal, throw away text editor, etc) easily where command tab is insufficient (when I have multiple terminal windows, eg)

> Does anyone actually do this?

Yes (but not for a browser). My terminal windows are 80x24, pretty much always. I do this today on Linux, I've done it through multiple versions of Windows, and I did it in my childhood on a 9" B&W "luggable" Mac screen.

I just like it, okay?

I do this on macOS much more than I do on Windows, yes. MacOS flows a lot better if you're willing to adopt its window management style.

As you said, browser and IDE are the big exceptions, plus things like Lightroom or my 3d printer's slicer.

Even VS Code usually lives as a smaller window when I'm using more a text editor rather than as an IDE.

I’ve been using Macs for development for 20 years, and even on a small laptop screen I don’t expand windows to fill the screen. So I guess, yes, there are a few weirdos out there at least?

for the longest time I never did this, but then I got a gigantic 4K screen, and I realized that it was almost giving me vertigo having apps like my IDE fullscreened, because I literally have to move my head in order to look everywhere.

so in response I changed my windowing strategy to having a set of windows floating around at exactly the size I want them, and then the advantage of the enormous screen is just how many windows I can have open at once

that being said, I use KDE not MacOS, and 90% of Mac users I'd guess are on laptops, so using this strategy sounds completely insane to me. On laptops I still default to fullscreening or "half-screening" most apps.

Some users switch apps by dragging windows around the screen, like a messy stack. A friend of mine didn't even know about Cmd+Tab to cycle through open apps. Users are weird.

I exclusive use complete fullscreen mode for apps i'm actively using and on large screens connect the workspaces, on small screen swipe back and forth. So I you never actually use that.

People do this, yeah. Even on Windows I've been over someone's shoulder walking them through something and it drives me nuts they work in a tiny window in a random part of the screen.

That’s because you use the button to make them whole screen?

I hate maximized windows. I like it when my windows are not maximized but I usually do have significant overlap between windows. Then I switch between windows based on the sliver of window that’s visible even when other windows are in focus. It’s the spatial way of thinking; just like how Finder purists think each folder on your disk should remember its own window size and location so you use your spatial memory to locate Finder windows. I find that this is significantly faster for my brain to process compared to the Windows style where almost all windows are maximized and people use Alt-Tab to switch between windows.

I would in fact say that the culture of not maximizing windows was a small reason why I switched to Mac OS X in the early 2000s.

Maximizing everything whether the document fills the screen or not is very Windows user behavior. macOS is not meant to be used that way.

I actually feel the opposite? The current green button action not only makes the window fill the entire screen, it also hides the menu bar AND creates a new virtual desktop and hides all of my other apps. And it seems to me that's what the majority of people want.

Meanwhile, I want to use my graphical, mutli-window preemptive multitasking operating system to, you know, use multiple applications at the same time.

I just use yabai...

I use a MacBook and a Mac mini personally, and I do not generally maximize any application that isn't implicitly a full-screen experience (e.g. a video player or a computer game).

Yes. I think the assumptions are made by people with two displays of at least 32" and ≥4K resolution.

In the office I have dual 24" monitors. At home I have a single 38" ultrawide. In desktop mode I almost never have one app taking up my full screen. In portable mode yeah, all full screen. The only exception is IDEs which get their own spaces and are basically self-contained tiling window managers anyway.

Yeah, anything that has an MDI metaphor going on should be ran fullscreen. Otherwise, what's the point? If the idea is to use the OS desktop space as the application window organizational space, then don't let people make apps that have different document panes.

This goes towards something that I've felt for a little while: at some point in time around the early 2000s, operating system vendors abdicated their responsibility to innovate on interaction metaphors.

What I mean is, things like tabbed interfaces got popularized by Web browsers, not operating systems. Google Chrome and Firefox had to go out of their way to render tabs; there was no support built into the OS.

The OS interfaces we have now are not appreciably different from what we had in the early 2000s. It seems absurd that there has been almost no progress in the last 25 years. What change there has been feels like it could have been accomplished in user-space, plus it doesn't get applied consistently across applications, thus making it feel like not a core part of the OS.

MacOS in particular was supposed to an emphasis on the desktop environment being the space of window and document level manipulation, as exemplified by the fact that applications did not have their own menubars. All application menu bars were integrated together at the top of the screen. Why should it be any different with any other UI organizational feature? Should not apps merely be a single window pane, accomplishing a single thing, and you combine multiple apps together to get something akin to an IDE out of them?

Well, I don't know if they should be. But they can't. Because OS vendors never provided a good means to do it. Even after signalling they wanted it.

I never work in full screen. It’s bizarre to me that people do. I don’t need full screen for anything, even Pycharm.

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MacOS assumes you won’t full screen every app because all of them ship with large enough, high enough resolution monitors that full screening a single app is a waste of valuable space. Unlike on cheap laptops with 1080p screens.

I suppose you could splurge for a Mac desktop and then get the cheapest, smallest screen possible, but I hope it’s rare.

I’m not trying to defend because I don’t like it either. But the Mac workflow has always been much more alt-tab focused than windows. With alt-tab and alt-shift-tab (reverse order) I feel like I can fly through my apps at the speed of thought.

Lots of native applications also pop up multiple windows with the expectation that they kind of just float around. But at least in Mac you can scroll on an app that isn’t in focus…