Siracusa, who grew up as a (classic) Mac user, explains his tiling and overlapping habits to Arment and Liss, who grew up as Microsoft Windows users and later switched, and they gasp in utter horror, shock and awe.
For example Siracusa explains that he currently has a dozen terminal windows open, and also 19 overlapping Safari windows, normal for him, in BBEdit he regularly hits 20-40; they ask him if he doesn’t know about tabs and he replies “Oh, I love tabs! Of course every Window has many tabs!”. How would he manage/organize hundreds of tabs in multiple applications with a snapping tiling manager? He can’t. It is fun from there. Like, he jokes after a work week his desktop has “sedimentary layers”.
Windows users who just maximize everything all the time and get giant empty white bars on the sides of their browser shock me. What an insane waste of space. You see windows users with Ultrawides and a maximized browser where the site is centered and 90% of the width of the screen is serving nothing but site border and it just makes me scream.
macOS replacing the “Zoom” stoplight buttons with “Full Screen” as the default behavior still irks me. Why would I ever want something full screen other than a video or game?
In the 2000s there was a huge push for distraction free software. Nearly every application was coming up with a distraction free mode.
Maximizing your window is similar to that. At the same time it doesn’t completely eliminate the window context and the ability to easily switch between applications like full screen does.
What kills me about it is I can't find a way to keep my other monitors from blacking out. I usually have at least two screens, I would love to dedicate one completely to code while leaving the other in normal mode for documentation, references, etc.
I recently started using MacOS and fell into this habit as well - I just end up leaving windows open floating underneath other apps. I learned about cmd+` which is handy to deal with multiple windows of the same app.
In Windows I tend to minimize stuff I'm not actively working on (but not always). In general while I also have a lot of "background" windows it feels a lot less fiddly than MacOS.
Personally I don't like how "minimizing" apps on MacOS puts them in the temporary section of the launcher, I'd rather they minimize back down to where the icon of the app normally lives. I would end up with a bunch of black squares on the launcher in some random order with a tiny icon of each telling me which app this actually is.
Is this why people complain about performance issues with browsers?
I have some perpetual habit to "clean" my desktop - I get annoyed if I have >15 tabs across 2 windows which easily happens.
> >5000 tabs among all of them
Not to be antagonistic but ... just why? There is no chance you are actively managing and keeping track of these? Is this because it doesnt matter if they are open or not? I am genuinely baffled and confused.
As a fellow multi-thousand tabber, I can explain what happens with me. So you're browsing, say, Reddit (maybe last month). You see something interesting. Two tabs: One for the content, one for the comments. You read the content and come across something you want to comment about or see if others are talking about. So you switch to the comments. Oh, somebody linked to something else. Another tab. And then you go down that rabbit hole and back to your original Reddit tab. Repeat.
Then you start to work on a project. You have various relevant links open for that, which of course results in opening even more tabs that branch off from those. But then you get distracted and there's another group of Reddit or HN tabs. Oops, right, I was working on that project. A few more project tabs. Then a bunch of Reddit / HN tabs. Then you start a new side project. Etc.
Why not close those comment tabs? Because you're interested and want to see all the new comments! Or you got halfway through and walked away and opened a new tab when you got back. Or you think 'that'll sure come in handy when it's time to work on <some project>, I'll come back to this later for sure!'.
Now, rather than doing the sensible thing and going through all of the previously opened tabs when you're bored, you open a new Reddit / HN window.
The relevant discussion starts at 1:33:00
https://atp.fm/episodes/96
Siracusa, who grew up as a (classic) Mac user, explains his tiling and overlapping habits to Arment and Liss, who grew up as Microsoft Windows users and later switched, and they gasp in utter horror, shock and awe.
For example Siracusa explains that he currently has a dozen terminal windows open, and also 19 overlapping Safari windows, normal for him, in BBEdit he regularly hits 20-40; they ask him if he doesn’t know about tabs and he replies “Oh, I love tabs! Of course every Window has many tabs!”. How would he manage/organize hundreds of tabs in multiple applications with a snapping tiling manager? He can’t. It is fun from there. Like, he jokes after a work week his desktop has “sedimentary layers”.