Really my biggest gripe with iOS/MacOS is that a lot of functionality is designed for an apparent fluidity rather than intuition — I find you often have to be taught how to do the things you are complaining about.

Stop. Just stop.

Look through the comments. Literally everyone rushing in here to defend Apple says something along the lines of "skill issue" or you just need to be taught how to do it. But when I prompt them to explain how they switch to a different window, of the same application, on one monitor, they list a convulsed series of steps that are decidedly not:

"Alt + Tab"

or

"Three finger swipe left and right"

like they are on windows / decent Linux desktop environments.

Apple's full screen paradigm has always been nonsense. They pushed it super hard for every application because they have a shitty dock that takes up too much screen real estate, and it's always caused problems with the entire rest of their windowing system as a result.

You know what is fluid? A three finger swipe left and right with handy window previews. MacOS's window management is just UX band aid on top of UX band aid, but they market it as innovation.

American judges have also been hobbled by decades of Republican legislation and judicial interpretations.

The American legal system has fucked itself into a corner where judges have to make these incredibly dumb technical rulings in specific interpretations and precedence, whereas as judges in many other western countries have much more freedom to look at the big picture or take into account systemic effects.

right click them,

I want to know which ones are running on that monitor.

but you're a programmer, why do you even care about the dock at all, you should hide it and use hammerspoon to make your system more suited for you.

Because I'm a programmer. I have enough code to write and maintain, and because if it was possible, I assume someone else would have done it by now given how much it's asked for.

On windows and KDE Plasma it definitely shows just the running application.

First of all no, on windows that's a setting, because windows has settings for things. You can either

• Show the running applications
• Show the running windows but collapse them into their application once the bar is full
• Show the running windows and never collapse them into their application

You can hover over it and get a ridiculously long list of windows but that's honestly just as bad as mac. They're both bad solutions. Either you right click and get a list of text you have to remember, or you get a picture of the window that you have to scroll (I usually have way more windows open than this)

Lmao, no they are not equally bad.

First of all, on windows you can also right click and get that shitty list, but you probably don't use that because it's worse than the hover.

Second, the hover exists, and is better. An image preview of the window plus it's title is easier to scan quickly.

Third, you can also three finger swipe left and right on a trackpad, or windows key plus arrow key left and right to switch between windows, and you get a handy horizontal list in the middle when you do so you know exactly where you are in that list.

I can't tell if these are jokes or not.

How do you switch between the running windows on a single monitor on a Mac, without having to consider every running application and window on your whole computer?

Alt Tabbing switches between applications, not windows.

Command + Arrow key, only switches between full screen windows / desktops, forcing you to full screen windows, just so you can quickly switch back and forth between them.

you can disable this.. like, what even is this complaint. You can literally hide it just like you can on windows.

The complaint is that Apple's designers are obnoxious as fuck to waste more space than Windows on a taskbar that does less.

so yeah you literally don't know how it works. it literally is the developer's choice for how long a notification stays up and if it is persistent or not.

No, it is not. The user chooses in the MacOS settings for an app whether that app getsalerts or banners, and that changes their behaviour entirely. Alerts disappear and get lost, banners persist on your desktop until you dismiss them.

How about this. Go try out Hammerspoon, go try out AltTab. If those are too difficult for you then use BetterTouchTool (though that costs money).

How about the trillion dollar corporation spend their time and money coding a functional window system into their 30 year old operating system? Or how about they stop using bullshit walled garden tactics like the iOS / Safari Rendering engine to force developers into buying Macs?

the single qualm about the popups not showing for 'true fullscreen' apps. But you don't like fs apps anyway! So don't use them!

Again, there is no way to switch between running windows on a single monitor.

I do not understand why some people feel the need to defend such a dumb fucking windowing system. You obviously recognize how nonsensical Apple's full screen system is, and yet you come in here to insist it's not worse then Windows' because it has awkward multi step equivalents to windows' single shortcuts.

Second, asking how many windows I have open is dumb since you are asking for a static number for something that changes day to day. If I say 6, you say 7. If I say 11, you say a billion. You aren’t looking for a real answer to consider, you are looking from something to lie about.

It's not a dick measuring contest, I'm just genuinely curious how someone who actually uses a lot of windows manages, or whether I'm talking to a university student writing an essay.

I will say I have 3 browsers with multiple windows and tabs open across 3 screens, vscode, terminal, 2 virtual machines in full screen a simple swipe reveals, pages and numbers, TextEdit as a scratchpad for notes, a few finder windows, messages, discord, mail, and probably a few other things.

So how do you quickly switch to a different instance of the same browser, on the same monitor?

First, windows 11 has objectively the worst desktop GUI. It’s a downgrade from its predecessor and so bad literally everyone beats it now. It’s not better, it’s familiar.

Oh its just "bad"? I listed numerous basic failings of MacOS, including specific window management failings and their patronizingly useless notification system. How about you do better than "bad"?

Fair point, but it's the OS that forces you to use a specific desktop environment.

touchthebelly

Yet it doesn't solve the problem because there is no OS level shortcut for switching between open windows on a single monitor.

It stinks! It stinks! It stinks!

First of all, the author states part of the issue, then bets against it at the end:

Maybe the technology is still in its primitive stage, some breakthrough will come, and tricked-out houses will soon work seamlessly, removing friction and frustration from everyday tasks. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

The technology is literally in its primitive infancy. Matter is the open smart home standard, and the first version only just launched a couple years ago. They've been continuously working on it and adding to it, but we are literally still in the 1.X era of the first smart home standard of any kind.

And that's just the backbone. That's like the Edison/Tesla/Westinghouse era, where North America just established that we're all going to use 120V, 60Hz AC electricity. It took a genuinely long time (decades) for light switches and receptacles to get as good and standardized and seamless as they are now.

The forces of corporate walled gardens do tend towards a fragmented experience, but interoperable standards have prevailed before, and Home Assistant is the single most actively developed open source project and is a driving force for true consumer focused home automation.

Secondly, a bunch of the author's complaints are nonsense / just badly designed versions of smart home products:

• Light switches without clear On/Off/Dim/Scene Select labels on the buttons, are again, bad design. It's perfectly possible to have a smart switch that is very easy to understand.
  • You know what also sucks? Having to tear out an entire drywalled ceiling and do 120V electrical wiring just because you want your light switch in a different spot, or you want it to control other lights, or you want a three+ way switch.
  • You know what's nice? Having a complete separation between powering the devices, and controling the devices. It's nice to be able to turn individual lights on/off/to different colours and brightnesses depending on what you're using the room for.
• Turning on the TV and it not turning on the streaming box, means it's an old tv or someone disabled HDMI CEC. New TVs will synchronize with the streaming box and soundbar / receiver automatically.
  • And I would argue that just having it start playing a random commercial filled channel, is worse for your brain then intentionally picking something to watch, but maybe that's generational.
• I don't know how the author, their mom, or the rental supplied tech guy couldn't figure out how to look up the instruction manual for the dishwasher, because literally zero models of Miele dishwasher require wifi for setup or use.
• Black glass oven buttons with opaque symbols have nothing to do with smart appliances, that's just bad design, and the author chose and bought a badly designed dumb oven, then blamed smart homes for some reason.
• Programmable thermostats have been badly designed since the 90s, and yet, literally everyone uses them. Why? Because if it's your home, you look up the instructions, program to a schedule that makes sense, and then you don't have to go and adjust it multiple times a day. Modern smart Thermostats do the same thing but are usually more intuitive and nicer designed. This is because the author rented an AirBNB (i.e. a home designed for people to live in) rather then a hotel (a home designed for someone to temporarily stay in).
• The author seems to not like touch screen numpads on their alarm system instead of buttons, because they display the weather while idle. Like ok, again, it's an AirBNB, not a hotel. The buttons are clear to someone who has literally never used them, but uglier for people who use them every day.
• And with lag, yes, there is inherently more lag in a digital control device then an analog one but there does not have to be lag to the UI, that's just bad hardware / software, and as long as they're wired, the actual control parts of modern control systems have literally imperceptible lag, on the basis of <100ms.

Honestly, my takeaway from this piece is:

• We're still in the infancy of smart home tech.
• A lot of minimalist high design home stuff is functionally terrible.
• Renting an AirBnB means dealing with a home designed for someone else.
• Owning a software company makes you stressed out and rage at every little thing that's different.

And you can do just that. You just have to use a different hotkey depending on whether the last used windows are of the same application or not.

Lmfao, "again, you can do that just as easily" followed by a series of keyboard shortcuts that do something else.

Again, this isn't complicated. I have:

Monitor 1:

• Browser with Google meet
• Browser with ticket
• Document editor
• Spotify

Monitor 2:

• Browser with output
• Browser with output with admin user logged in
• Email
• Document for reference

I'm on monitor 1 and want to quickly switch to the other browser window, how do I do that?

One of your keyboard shortcuts will cycle between running applications, not useful if I'm on the same application already. The other will cycle through all browser windows across all monitors, cycling me through two other windows and changing stuff in every monitor just to get to the other browser window on the monitor I'm on.

The only way on MacOS to achieve the quick switching, per monitor, window behaviour, that Windows has, is to full screen them and use command + arrow left/right, and it's still worse then Windows' three finger swipe (/ windows key + arrow keys), since it's slower and gives you no preview of the windows unless you go to mission control.

Yeah, that's not what I want because again, the application is not the context the user thinks about.

I want to switch between to the last used window, on that monitor, or pick between the different open windows, on that monitor.

On Windows, you literally just three finger swipe left and right. On MacOS you can use mission control to see impossible tiny thumbnails of full screen apps, and if you happen to be on a desktop you might be able to make out which open window is which, but if you're not or have too many open you just can't.

you can download an app and just drag it into your apps folder. No installation required. You can also just use something like brew with --cask Param then you don't need to even download the app first

Technically you can do that on Windows without even the application folder, if the app is written to be a portable app, then you can execute that file from anywhere. Admittedly not quite the same thing, but still possible.

You can modify most settings programmatically

I will say, it's easier to edit most setting programmatically on MacOS, if those settings exist in the first place. On Windows the programmatic way to edit some settings is truly ancient and arcane, but on the flip side, windows actually has settings for virtually everything. MacOS doesn't even have a way of letting you have your mouse and your trackpad scroll different directions.

Lmfao. I use all the dumbass window management features apple provides. Again, they're just objectively worse then the ones that windows provides.

Alt tabbing applications is nonsense when a single application like your browser will likely have multiple windows open, each of which is serving a completely different task.

Making the only way to quickly switch between windows, being switching between full screen windows is literal nonsense.

It fucking sucks at managing applications and their windows. It's designed for writing your novel in café where you have one Google doc open and that's it.