I tend to agree that the functionality you see in Rectangle or Magnet should be native. Window placement shouldn't be a third party app.
But whenever I've asked people at Apple about this, the response has been "Well, Apple is historically just very opinionated about window placement and settings." The overall vibe was "Apple knows best."
Being opinionated is good, but at some point you have to realize when you went the wrong path. Window management on macOS is terrible, period. This isn't just force of habit or "just another way to do", it sucks. Even command+tab is terrible, it doesn't even browse all the open windows but the open app, which is a completely irrelevant distinction, I have to install AltTab because of this.
The way macOS does window management is internally consistent, and for those of us who have used it for decades, it works perfectly well. Just because Windows chose to do it a different way, and Linux copied Windows because it had a monopoly on the desktop, doesn't mean what macOS is doing is bad.
If you don't like it, you don't have to use macOS. (Or, you can install the exact utilities various people are mentioning to force macOS to act like Windows.)
No, no, and no. The way macOS handles split screen is objectively bad, that's not an opinion. It's clunky, slow, not very discoverable, not intuitive, and is painful to use because it requires using the fullscreen mode. Windows does it a certain way and it's great and natural. Linux desktop environment copied it not because it's Windows, but because it's good. Why is there no desktop environment copying macOS window handling if it's just as good? Because it's not, it sucks.
Some things on macOS are just different, like having the red/green/yellow button on the left instead of on the right on Windows. Neither is objectively good or bad, just different.
But that I cannot take a window, drag and drop it to the side to make it take half the screen size is bad. It's an obvious feature nowadays and macOS should handle it natively. They don't even have to remove the way they do it currently, because it has its use (I have a permanently open full screen/split screen with my email client and Slack, it's great for that), just add a new mechanism that works better for quick split screen.
Same with command+tab, it sucks that it doesn't work with open windows (eg if I have 2 open Firefox windows, only 1 will be displayed). It used to work like that so I'm ok with macOS keeping it as a default, but WHY don't they add a setting to do what people expect? Or why don't they add option+tab as a shortcut with this behaviour?
I've used macOS, Windows, and various Linux DEs (KDE, XFCE, Gnome) extensively in my life and all of them have good and bad concepts. This is not a blind spot issue, just that some UI concepts work better than other, and the correct thing to do is to adapt.
FWIW, you can do a split-window layout without fullscreen by holding Option while hovering over the green traffic light.
Personally I use this (or even resize or rearrange windows) very rarely though. Most of the time if I need two documents side by side it’s in an IDE that supports panes.
As for command-tab, it’s deeper than just one command. The macOS windowing model is just fundamentally different with how windows are not equal to processes. A toggle would need to change the windowing model of the OS to work properly.
I put two windows next to each other all the time. It's perfectly discoverable. I just drag one window on the right....
...then I drag the other window on the left.
Boom. Done. No fancy features required.
See, you're coming from a basic assumption that you will do most of your work with windows full-screened. That's not how classic macOS worked, that's not how Mac OS X worked for many years, and that's not how many of us have our workflows. That's how Windows worked back in the '90s, and the paradigm remained even though screens have gotten much, much bigger since then.
What you're demanding is that all OSes "adapt" to become a UI monoculture. So that the only way any of us can do things is the way you think is "objectively better", even though the evidence you have for that is "well, Windows does it this way, and Linux copied them, and I'm so used to it I can't imagine doing things any other way, so it must be best!"
Mac OS is designed to use workspaces. The idea is you have main windows in fullscreen and use the trackpad swipe to switch between virtual desktops. Basically they never want you to move windows at all. Maybe one of the virutal desktops has your notes and finder and other smaller apps
You are using it wrong. See, in the intended setup, windows simply don't open. You don't even need a computer, just wire Apple some thousands regularly.
No doubt that window tiling should be a native feature. But that's not even my biggest gripe with macOS. You simply cannot disable animations. Moving between workspaces is so slow because there is a 300ms transition. There is an accessibility reduced motion settings, but all it does is replace the transition from a slide to a fade in/out. The only solution I could find is to keep all the windows at full width and height in a single workspace. But guess what? CMD+Tab only iterates over the open apps, not their windows. So I need to install yet another third party app to be able to navigate between open windows.
I've always been kind of an Apple fanboy, but I've been recently finding myself in this novel situation where I'm dreaming of a System76 laptop so I can just run PopOS. When I first started using macOS 15 years ago I was all about the slick UI animations. Now I just want an unobtrusive OS that's fast. Heck, I've been even flirting with the idea of not even having a desktop environment at all. A window manager should be enough. Maybe I'm just getting old?
> They copied it a little bit, but it's very mouse oriented (option-click the green zoom button to snap windows to left/right).
Moom, which is the tool I prefer, similarly shows a popover when hovering over the green button.
Personally I prefer this sort of approach and wish it could be replicated on other OSes. The Aero Snap way of doing things with the noisy “should I snap here” animations are annoying and too easy to accidentally trigger.
Is there a Mac app to copy Windows' windowing behavior?
I want different virtual desktops to behave like they are different computers with a shared clipboard, i.e., I don't want to see apps from other virtual desktops showing up on 'Alt-Tab', dock bar to show all open apps, etc.
I like Spectacle better than anything I’ve seen on Windows or Linux, and I’ll take installing it once then never thinking about it again over what it takes to get a tolerable keyboard layout & shortcuts on other platforms.
Can't they just copy what windows and linux are doing?