Mac OS Could Improve on Windows Management

There is lot of improvement that could be made in the way Mac OS deals with windows.

My first and biggest rant of all is that whenever I disconnect my 24-inch display from my MacBook, all windows are kind of shuffled around. And most are out of sight.

What Mac OS does, in fact, is take the absolute positions of each windows — where the 0,0 coordinates would be the top left corner of the screen — and stick to that whenever the screen resolution changes.

In order to illustrate this particular annoyance, let’s imagine that the Echofon main window is positioned on the right side of my screen, on my 24-inch display configured as the main display. When I disconnect it, Mac OS flips the main display to the MacBook’s, and starts repositioning windows. At least that is what it should do.

As I have said above, windows’ position are absolute and that means that this particular window we were talking about has not moved a bit: pixel-wise, it is still as far from the top edge as before (something like 1400,100 from top left). Since the resolution has changed — switching from 24-inch to 13-inch —, this window is now outside the screen.

What Mac OS should do instead is saving windows positions relatively to the nearest edge. That means that the position of the aforementioned window would not be 1400,100 from the top left but 100,20 from the top right corner. (I guess I am being confusing right now but it is pretty straightforward.) In fact, the windows would snap into the screen whatever the size of the display and whatever the screen resolution are.

My second, and smallest, rant is that I would like for Mac OS to let me set a sort of gutter along the edges of the screen. That way, maximized windows would retain a n pixels gap from the edges. My motivation is that I have never used a window full screen — apart from video apps or extraordinary fullscreen browsing I mean — since I have left Windows in 2005. Mac OS has this kind of thing (for lack of a better name) that makes you want to see your desktop picture and the menubar and the dock while working.

Anyway, should Mac OS developers had to work on one of these two points, I would blindly ask for my first point to be taken care of.

Update: Tim Luckey suggested me to try Stay. While it does not solve all my problems, it allows me to save states of my various windows and restore them when the application is launched or when a display is (dis)connected. Handy. Thanks, Tim!