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"?

You can change all keyboard shortcuts in macOS.

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.

Yep.

Turns out you were wrong. Or your lived experience was 20 years ago.

Yes, there’s a dot under its icon in the dock. If the application is in the foreground then you’ll see its name in the top left, the first menu in the menu bar to the right of the Apple menu.

It’s also the case that regular applications (as opposed to background processes) cannot be running without having an icon in the dock. Icons can be left in the dock for quick access to launch those applications. If an app is not left in the dock then running it will add it to the dock along with a dot underneath it, along with a bouncing animation to draw your attention to it being added to the dock. Quitting an application that’s not normally pinned to the dock will cause it to disappear from the dock.

close the last window, and accidentally leave an application running that chewing up memory for no reason

Mac OS has memory compression and paging built in. If you leave an application running with no open windows, it’ll be idle in that state (it can also be idle with open windows, if you’re not interacting with them or running calculations in them) and when memory is low the operating system will first compress the memory of idle applications and later page them out (copied to storage and removed from memory) to disk (a fast SSD on a modern machine). An application that is paged out is so fast to page in and resume working that I’ve never even been able to tell when it happens. It basically feels like the computer has infinite memory available.

In practice that means you can leave every single one of your applications open and you won’t have any memory issues unless they’re all actively working and allocating memory to get work done. I leave almost all my commonly used applications open for months at a time with no issues. If there were any applications leaking memory or wasting battery then the system would warn me under the battery menu (listed as an app using significant energy).

• think you're on the last window and go to explicitly close the application using Command Q, only to find out you still had another window open behind it or on another monitor that you needed, because MacOS provides no logical way of finding windows.

The Mac has tons of ways to find windows. For one, every application has a Window menu in the menu bar that lists all open windows, lets you switch to the ones you want (they may be on separate spaces) as well as more advanced stuff such moving and arranging and resizing all windows for an application:

Other ways to find windows include command-tab which cycles applications (but will bring up a window from that application if there are any open) and the trackpad gestures 3 finger swipe up to show all open windows in the current space (and be able to switch spaces or rearrange windows into different spaces) as well 3 finger swipe down which does the same thing but only for the windows opened by the current application.

It’s quite easy to explicitly tell an application to stop running: Quit (command-q). The Mac has worked this way since 1984. If you have unsaved documents you will be prompted to save them (though most modern apps have used the OS’s built in support for autosave for years now) and then all windows will be closed before the app quits.

Closing the last open window of an application is not an instruction to close the application, it’s an instruction of the form “I am done working with this document now.” No more, no less.

This dates to a time when computers could reasonably be expected to work on single documents that consume all available memory such that the user must close the current document before opening a new one. Furthermore, in those days the application itself may reside on a different floppy disk from the document itself. Forcing the application to close upon closing the last document would then force the user to swap floppies in order to restart the application and then swap floppies again to open another document.

I digress. The floppy swapping issue is clearly no longer relevant but the metaphor remains: the Mac was conceived as a virtual desktop where users would work on their documents using applications (tools). If I’m cutting a piece of paper with a pair of scissors and then I put away the piece of paper, I don’t expect the scissors to put themselves away at the same time. I took out the scissors deliberately and I will put them away when I decide I’m finished with them.

But that's the thing, you haven't instructed it that you want it to quit, you've only instructed it to close a window. That's what that button does, and its function shouldn't change based on whether it's the last window in the application. Plenty of uses for running programs headless and not having them take up resources by keeping a window drawn (though certainly less of an issue now than it used to be).

Dunno, I like more granular control instead of changing functions based on context when it comes to basic UI. If I want to quit a program, I quit it. If I want to close a window, I hit the UI element that does that, and only that.

But this split goes back to the late 80s: Microsoft was late to the multi-window paradigm, and their first implementation pretty much was wrapped in one program, one window. If a program needed multiple windows or panes, they were all drawn in a parent window. Closing that parent window closed the program. They caught up I think with Windows 3.1 (and not fully until Win 95, though my memory is fuzzy, it's been 31 years!), but kept the program-window coupling because their users were used to that, and it's stuck. Linux desktop environments were built more towards the Windows paradigm so as not to confuse the largest source of new users, so now that stuck, too.

Understandable, but it's just not how macOS works; it's an intentional paradigm. I guess the use case is "dealing with documents", opening, editing, closing, in repetition.

But closing the application and all its open documents in one go also has a common UX pattern: Command+Q. So if that's what you really want, do that instead of closing windows/documents.

It's just a very simple matter of making happen what you want to happen instead of not doing that. 🤷‍♂️

With all this said, I don't think macOS is a good operating system. It's very well thought out and very cohesive and very nice looking, great for beginners. But it's just not practical for me. The window management is clumsy and lacks a lot of features, I don't like how applications are installed (or uninstalled; sometimes packages can't be easily uninstalled), and I don't like how the hardware will just not support the latest operating system after a while.

With Linux, I can just keep going and upgrade the system in perpetuity and it'll just keep going.

I also find tiling managers are good, but after about 15 years with i3 I've committed myself to Niri. It's so good. A whole new paradigm that fits my mental model very well.