Comment by thenewwazoo
13 hours ago
> The distinctive tabbed window titles look neat, but they have a reduced draggable area, so I’d have to think harder every time I wanted to move a window.
Now imagine macOS progressing to the point where title bars have been replaced with toolbars, and buttons no longer have borders, so you have to guess what part of the window will drag it.
:-|
The feature those provide isn't immediately obvious in a static screenshot, the tabs are "magnetic" and you can take your "word" application and "stick" it's tab next to your email tab, and now you have a "tabbed application" with the email app tab on the left, and the word app tab on the right. You might have one "window" that is your front end dev workflow (firefox, vscode, 2-3 term windows) with 5 tabs, and then a second window that is your backend workflow of vscode + 4 terminal tabs, and a database workflow that is pgadmin + 2 terminal tabs. For example. I haven't seen anything like it, and I'm not sure how it handles windows with a smaller fixed window size, like winamp.
Haiku made them magnetic. In classic BeOS you had to manually position the windows on top of each other, then hold shift and manually drag the tab over from the left. And they wouldn't be tethered together: moving one window wouldn't move the other. It was annoying enough that I never bothered. By the end of BeOS's life I was mostly using the Mac OS 8 titlebar style (accessed by holding down all the modifier keys and pressing the Be menu).
> I haven't seen anything like it
I remember using the fluxbox wm like this back on the university Sun machines
Yep, reeeally nice feature, used it on Linux. After that I wondered why apps bothered to implement their own tabbing when you could just stack Windows as tabs (assuming more WMs would adopt that feature).
Also Windows was going to have this, but never left the preview builds, there was a BUILD or Ignite session were it was demoed.
Granted it was already Windows 10, so nothing that original.
It would just stack the windows of different sizes, so if you hit the Winamp tab the smaller Winamp tab would be at the top of the stack. Pretty simple and intuitive.
I loved the tabs on BeOS.
I really like the linux solution here. My windows have no titlebar/borders at all. To move a window hold the window key and drag the window from anywhere, to resize hold the window key and right-click drag.
And yes I know it's not really a linux specific thing, but that gets the point across. It is very common on linux. I could twirl my os/desktop hipster mustache and say "my obsd/spectrwm desktop handles no window chrome really well" but then I feel really pretentious instead of only slightly.
I wrote something to do this 13 years ago, someone picked it up after 6 years of inactivity (since I don't own a Mac anymore): https://github.com/justjake/metamove
Yeah I do this too, though on macOS (through Rectangle, the window manager). Control+Option drags the window under my cursor. I picked that up from the Super key drag on Linux
How funny, this is exactly the control scheme I ended up with for a window-manager-esque system I was working on recently. I love finding out I've rediscovered something proven to work well :)
For Windows there is AltDrag or the AltSnap fork.
https://github.com/RamonUnch/AltSnap
https://github.com/stefansundin/altdrag
Also built-in to PowerToys.
> I really like the linux solution here. My windows have no titlebar/borders at all. To move a window hold the window key and drag the window from anywhere, to resize hold the window key and right-click drag.
Speaking of which. It is not a Linux solution but stock X11 twm window manager features dating back into 1988, i.e.:
– replicates the described behaviour with the pin-point precision[0].
[0] m4 stands for the Mod4 modifier, now commonly assigned to the Super/Windows key. The equivalent 1988 configuration would have used m (Meta), since the original binding syntax supported Shift, Control and Meta only.