I’m sure someone will buzz in with some hidden way to do it. ‘Hold cmd-shft-9 then say these magic words and voila!’ No. Dragging the window with the cursor should suffice.
Edit: I’ll also add that having to buy a huge $200+ display adapter so you can connect 2 external monitors to a MacBook, whereas a slimline $30 device will do the same for Windows laptops, is total bullshit.
This is such poor execution on Apple's part.
Pedantic, but chance of miss is actually less than 14% more likely since the user's click location is not uniformly random over the thickness area, it's biased toward the center (normally distributed).
Which implies there was some regression, some issue, some incorrect behavior or negative impact. One has to wonder… what could it have been? What could the issue with having a more accurate clickbox for the corner of the window possibly be?
I want two things:
- Predefined zones à la FancyZones - Tied edges (there’s surely a better term for this) so that I can grab the edge between two apps and have them both resize together (one gets smaller as the other gets bigger).
Please someone tell me this exists without a subscription!
Finally I realized the issue: if a window spans across two displays, it won't resize. Insane!
(I have an external monitor up, laptop down, and it's easy to move a window such that it stretches a few pixels from monitor to the laptop. No resize for you!)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/qv0vmz/missing_supe...
it's stupidly difficult to grab windows by the flat edges, too
I am forced to use this abomination of an operating system just because.
Come on Lenovo, make it happen
The UI wasn’t perfect before. It’s slowly been getting worse with each of their dumb updates to make it look more like iOS over the years.
What we’re forced to use now is just a joke. Ignoring all the visual design issues they can’t even make basic stuff fully functional.
I get the cult of Steve is a bit oversold but the proprietor liked to check the finish on the car rolling out the end of the line and if his fingers felt a rough edge on a panel he had no compunction stopping the production line to find the problem. The current generation have a bit too much "fixed in post" going on.
Where are the engineers allocated to?
Who's driving the bus? Cause it sure ain't Siri either.
For example, "open two file browsers, navigate to $home in one and $downloads in the other, move and rename a few files between them" is a 10 second task on Windows (Win+E x2, quick clicks on the explorer links, easy to scroll around, move files, drag, rename, anything you want). On Mac I get about 7 system ding sounds and Finder windows bugging off the side of my screen while simultaneously deciding the best way to show downloads in a list is alphabetically and with 256x256 tiled icons. It's just an indescribably bad and slow experience to do any kind of file management on Mac.
Another example. Take a screenshot and quickly redact some info with a black box. Easy on windows that I can type it out exactly (win+s, drag box, win key "paint" enter control v box tool save boom). On Mac?? After command shift 4 to take a screenshot I think it's actually physically impossible to edit it within 60 seconds.
I hear it when I read 7 px -> 6 px means 14%(!!!!) less likely to find the horizontal/vertical only drag area.
Fitts's Law is logarithmic, not linear, and at these sizes the dominant factor is whether the target is discoverable at all, not its sub-millimeter width. "14%" smuggles in precision that doesn't exist in the underlying motor reality; it takes an imperceptible physical change and launders it through a ratio with a small denominator to produce a number that feels alarming. You could just as honestly say "we moved the edge by 0.097 mm**" and nobody would blink.
* I think? It feels like there'd be prior art on this
**
ppi = 262
inch = 1/ppi
mm = inch \* 25.4
# 1px ≈ 0.097 mm ≈ 0.004" Press Control-Up Arrow (or swipe up with three or four fingers) to enter Mission Control, drag a window from Mission Control onto the thumbnail of the full-screen app in the Spaces bar, then click the Split View thumbnail. You can also drag an app thumbnail onto another in the Spaces bar.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/use-apps-in-split-v...There is also this option you can enable to drag windows around when holding a shortcut: https://petar.dev/notes/drag-windows-on-macos/
Hovering over the green dot in the title bar will bring up some simple window tiling options.
https://support.apple.com/guide/macbook-air/manage-windows-o... has more to say on the subject, more recent versions of the OS than I use have added more stuff in this vein, personally I just use Moom and have been for years.
For those it works for, it works really well. For those who came from windows always being maximized or split into a grid, it’s a nightmare.
Pretty similar to differences in real world desk styles, actually.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-window-tilin...
With Windows you need to remove most of the cruft, Mac is no different; most people are using some combination of Raycast, Rectangle, Alfred, etc...
This is completely incorrect, and the solution is way more discoverable than needing to know obscure things like Win+E. Click the thumbnail that appears in the bottom right, then click the marker icon.
> For example, "open two file browsers, navigate to $home in one and $downloads in the other, move and rename a few files between them" is a 10 second task on Windows (Win+E x2, quick clicks on the explorer links, easy to scroll around, move files, drag, rename, anything you want).
Similarly, if you know the platform-specific shortcuts, this is less than 10 seconds on macOS. Click finder in dock, hit Command-N twice for new windows, drag each window to one of the L/R edges of the screen to tile, click downloads in the sidebar on one, click the home icon/username in the sidebar on the other.
* https://www.hammerspoon.org/
* https://gist.github.com/joedrago/bfc54f4083b070fe998d519cc6c...
Which seems like a sensible and convenient choice to me.
Maybe it isn't working so predictably for you?
when you resize windows 50 times a day because your workflow depends on it, 1 pixel less of grab area is immediately noticeable. when you're reviewing a spec in a conference room, it looks fine on the slide.
this is basically the same problem in any product: the distance between the person making the design decision and the person living with it determines how many small annoyances ship. the jobs model worked because he was pathologically close to the end user experience. most orgs aren't set up that way, they optimize for shipping velocity, and stuff like resize targets doesn't show up on a sprint board.
I've used Linux as my daily OS for 20 years and got so used to alt-right resize and alt-left drag that the macOS and Windows way of actually needing to move my mouse to the corner or edge of a window feel almost barbaric in comparison.
I still have found no way free equivalent on macOS.
For example: imagine you have 2 windows, the lower right corner of one window almost touching the upper right corner of the other, so that the bounding rectangles overlap but the graphics don't.
With the inaccurate "false square" corners, you just had to check the bounding rectangles, to know which window to resize, now you have to check the actual graphics (or more likely, a mask).
I am not saying it is the problem, but that's the kind of thing that can happen. Or it may be a simple bug, like a crash, memory corruption, an unhandled exception, the usual stuff, but they couldn't fix it in time and it is better to revert instead of leaving the buggy code or pushing an untested fix.
I'm more interested in how or why this bug was approved up be worked on so quickly after it was surfaced, rather than other longstanding and arguably more impactful bugs.
It reads like a parody.
I haven't used Windows since the early days of 10 when I moved wholesale to Apple, but let's be really real - Apple users mocking "obscure shortcuts" in other OSes is throwing stones in a glass house:
Cmd+` to scroll through windows of the current app?
Cmd+Option+H to hide other apps?
Cmd+Shift+Ctrl+4 to clipboard copy a screenshot?
Quick, is Mission Control a three finger swipe up? Or down? Or is that Expose?
Cmd+space,Cmd+B to search web from Spotlight
Cmd+tab, release tab, press Q - quit app without switching to it
Cmd+tab, then down - Expose.
We get lost when being right is seen as having value - instead of improving clarity and precision if needed in a specific context.
> get the super+right click to resize working somehow (there is a native way to move windows with ctrl+cmd+left click which was nice).
I've tried this with Hamerspoon to no avail and ultimately gave up... if you find a workaround, I'm all ears!
I really miss AHK...
full screen is still its own thing as you mention, though
¹ aka Windows key
Window snapping was implemented some time ago: https://www.macrumors.com/2024/06/12/macos-sequoia-window-ti...
Instead of win key, you can press F3, or just set a hotkey that works for you in the System Preferences
Instead of clicking the red maximize button, you can double-click the window header / title. This will use an algorithm to try to resize the window to the best size for its content.
On the Mac side where key combos and modifier use is more widespread among users, it’s probably because there’s no intuitive visual that can be associated with the interaction.
Is this the reason why "closed" applications still show up in cmd+tab?
Do you have any "inside knowledge" that this was caused by LLM use or do you just attribute everything you don't like to AI?
I mean, yes, Windows has PowerToys which is an installed add-on, but on Mac we're not talking about Mac Vs. PowerToys, Mac isn't even competing with basic Windows features. PowerToys is competing with the PAID third-party software for Mac.
Edit: Finder still has the correct zoom behavior, it's the only program I've found so far that does.
I'm not even saying Mac is superior here, just that there's a quick way to do full screen splits
Unless you're working in an environment where absolutely no third party tools are allowed, it's expected for someone to spend at least a little bit of time adjusting the workspace to their preferences.
Additionally all of the tools I listed technically have paid plans but they're all free to use, I've never paid for Raycast yet even the free features blow out of the water any desktop management/productivity tooling I've used on Windows or Linux.
In the release notes for macOS 26.3 RC, Apple stated that the window-resizing issue I demonstrated in my recent blog post had been resolved.

I was happy to read that, but also curious about what had actually changed.
So I wrote a little test app.
It performs a pixel-by-pixel scan in the area around the bottom-right corner of the window, hammering it with simulated mouse clicks to detect exactly where it responds to those clicks (red), where it’s about to resize (green), where it’s about to resize vertically or horizontally only (yellow), and where it doesn’t receive any mouse events at all (blue).
And indeed, the window resize areas now follow the corner radius instead of using square regions:
So that’s definitely better!
But unfortunately, as you can see, the thickness of the yellow area – used for resizing the window only vertically or horizontally – also became thinner. The portion that lies inside the window frame is now only 2 pixels instead of 3.
In total the thickness went down from 7 to 6 pixels, which is a 14% decrease, making it 14% more likely to miss it.
When the final version of macOS 26 was released I was curious if Apple might have further refined the implementation. So I performed the scan once again. But to my big surprise, the fix was not only unrefined – it was completely removed! So we are now back to the previous square regions:

And in fact, the release notes have also been updated: the problem went from a “Resolved Issue” to a “Known Issue”.
