points by ant6n 2 days ago | 0 comments
The problem is that window management is so atrocious in Mac OS that using multiple desktops is just asking for trouble. Like of you close one window of some software, it will jump to some random other window of the same software on some other desktop.
In the end you’ll spend a significant amount of your time trying to “get back” to where you just where (that alt-tab, a possible savior for this in all other OSs, doesn’t work at all on Mac just adds to the UX mess)
[–] asdff 2 days ago
Ehh I'm not to caught up with window management on macos. Bunch of shells open I might use tmux. But otherwise I just keep things in piles organized in spaces, and use expose all to get to whatever I need in the pile. It works much like the piles on my desk in real life so I'm comfortable with it. But it was better in leopard when it was a grid of spaces vs a line of spaces. Less rigidity was nice.
[–] ant6n 2 days ago
But even then. If you close a terminal, it'll jump to some random terminal on another desktop. It just doesn't make any sense.
[–] wtallis 2 days ago
It doesn't make a lot of sense to me as a default, but there's an option to turn off the automatic switching of spaces when switching applications, and it pretty much eliminates the unwanted switches from closing the last window on the current space.
[–] majormajor 2 days ago
[–] spockz 2 days ago
I get that that behaviour shouldn’t just be changed but I would appreciate it if there were another key combination that would allow cycling through all windows of an app.
[–] vel0city 2 days ago
In the end though I just feel like it's extra cognitive load to have to think about two different shortcuts to do what is in many ways the same thing.
Say, I've got two browser windows open and a code editor open. I'm wanting to flip through the browser windows to check on things while I work in the code editor. In reality I'm just wanting to juggle the three windows, but depending on if I'm wanting to go from browser to browser it's a different shortcut than if I'm wanting to go from editor to browser. And there's a good chance I'll then need to swap from editor to browser, then issue a different shortcut to go from that browser to the other. When I could have just hit the same shortcut twice.
I've just never really encountered a situation where I've felt like it added something, but I'm constantly having cases where its more annoying.
[–] majormajor 2 days ago
The 40-year-deep-history Mac answer to workflows like that with a small working set with frequent cross-app-one-to-other-switching IMO is mouse-based navigation + spatial partially-overlapping windows, but this seems to be an extremely foreign concept to Windows/*nix users that grew up on full-screen-maximize or tiling. So I don't think is particularly likely to be adopted by anyone who doesn't already have it burned into their brains at this point. :) There's a lot of these old Mac bones still baked into the OS (e.g. if you have a folder on your desktop, and double click it, and move it, then close it, it'll open to the location you moved it to next time. And that memory is separate from that for another folder on your desktop. Though some of the follow-on behaviors have changed (opening folders in already-open windows used to behave similarly, opening new windows by default).
The 20-year-history version is my own personal lord and savior: Exposé hot corners.
Spaces and no-mouse navigation are still in many ways comparative afterthoughts to mouse-based/spatial workflows. Though as someone with 30+ year of Mac muscle memories in my head, the switching-windows-vs-switching-app concept and awareness of "where" I am relative to it is pretty embedded.
[–] ant6n 1 day ago
The whole window arranging so you can click on them doesn't help you when you have multiple desktops, close some terminal, and jump to some other terminal three desktops away. Like, arranging windows so you see some part of it always, just so you can click on it to switch back and forth between windows feels like a horrible workaround for broken alt-tab behavior. But there's additional levels of weirdnesses that just make using Apple frustrating and scary, like it's constantly throwing random curve balls. It just reeks disorganization. Which is really unfortunate - 10 years ago or so (when witcher task switcher still worked) I really enjoyed working mac. Back then I was mostly coding in the same windows I guess. Nowadays it's business work, and it's just a pain.