If you grab the right-hand edge of a window, you can drag it left or right to resize the window. However, if you instead drag it up or down, you can move the whole window.
And if you hold option (alt) when dragging left or right, it will mirror the drag on the opposite side, so you can quickly expand or contract the window size
Wait... you can actually maximise without going full screen? I thought Apple would never back down on that - I use a third-party app to do this usually. If there's a similar thing to let me make a window full height and half width, and to center a window, I can get rid of that app altogether...
Holding Option when clicking the green maximize button will expand the window without entering full screen mode. You know you're doing it right if the glyph inside the button turns from two triangles to a plus sign.
When I do this with for instance a Finder window, it just "zooms" it. You can get the same effect if you go to the Window menu -> Zoom. "zoom"ing tells macos to make the window fit the content that's inside of it, however the app feels like doing that, even if you damn well just want the window to be as big as it can be.
BUT, option + double-clicking any window corner will actually make even a Finder window take up the whole visible space of the screen without being "maximized" (without creating a new screen / workspace).
(double-clicking any corner will make the window expand all the way towards the corner you've clicked; if you have a finder window in the middle of the screen and you double-click the NE corner, it'll get bigger in the N and E directions until it hits the menu bar + the right edge of the screen.
similarly, double-clicking any edge will make the window expand all the way to the border of the screen in the direction of the edge you clicked, and option + double-clicking an edge makes it grow both in that direction and the opposite.)
completely undiscoverable, I feel like I'm lost while Maniac Mansion, just trying every possible Verb + Object (+ Indirect Object) combination to try to read the game dev's mind.
> completely undiscoverable, I feel like I'm lost while Maniac Mansion, just trying every possible Verb + Object (+ Indirect Object) combination to try to read the game dev's mind.
I just found out that Apple has a pretty neat guide on all of this [1]. That you can find by googling or searching the builtin system help. I never looked at the system help before, but it looks like Apple did a good job documenting these features. Maybe I should start to RTFM for my OS...
I still agree on the discoverability part but I can't think of a way that would be better. It makes sense that there isn't a button for these commands, but if there isn't you need a manual or a tutorial and who is going to look at these? Maybe someone smarter has a better idea on how to solve this.
I browsed through the guide a bit, but it seems to be anything but comprehensive, rather it's quite similar to comment threads like this where there's a smattering of less-well-known hidden functionality among the more obvious stuff.
> I still agree on the discoverability part but I can't think of a way that would be better.
In Emacs, C-h m runs `describe-mode` which goes through the major mode of the current buffer and all the currently active minor modes, and puts their descriptions and all the mode-specific key/mouse bindings into a new Help buffer.
It would probably be incredible overkill, but I'd adore an overlay view in macos where each screen widget / distinct region had an outline or different shaded color overlaid on it, and when you hover each widget it shows you all the "keymaps" / event bindings for it. Give me all the knowledge; I use Emacs by choice for crying out loud.
That’s a specific setting, under Settings > Dock & Menu Bar > Double-click a window’s title bar to zoom | minimize. It should default to zoom on a fresh install.
Excellent, thanks — that's very helpful! It's not quite perfect — it does the old 'make it big, but not as big as possible' behaviour that macOS used to do, but that seems to be app-specific, so it actually does what I want for some things.
Double clicking on an edge will cause it to expand to the edge of the window. The shift + option trick doesn't just expand to the first edge it hits, it looks like both edges expand as much as possible.
So when combined with double clicking on a window corner, that makes all for edges expand to display size (even if the window was partially off the monitor).
By convention on Macs option more generally means "anchor at the center." The selection tool in a proper Mac graphics program, for example, will pin the center of the selection to the point where you clicked instead of pinning a corner there. Resizing shapes in a well-made diagramming app behaves this way too. Been this way since the '80s.
But you can't drag left or right first. If you do, you won't be able to move the window. You either have to decide which one you want to do on the first click.
