All correct. In daily use, I almost never use those buttons - I end up manually sizing/placing windows.

The the MacOS scheme of doing this leads a sort of organic, emergent window layout - I always end up with windows staggered to display relevant bits. With Windows (and with most window managers, X), things always end up either strict tiled or stacked.

I'm very used to the Mac way and prefer it, but that could just be the result of long use. It doesn't waste space (Windows apps always seem to have lots of dead space to me and makes me work to be able to see parts of other windows) and forces me to switch windows far less. But it is a fiarly subtle thing.

The amount of tedious manual work required to resize and arrange several windows on MacOS (6+ to latest OSX) bothered me all the time I had a misfortune to have to use it. It does not even have something like edge snapping.

My WM of choice is now Xfwm, which allows to rearrange windows easily without gaps, make windows fill available space (vertical and horizontal separately), or tile them by dragging to corners.

On OSX, things like Spectacle and Magnet sort of help.

The lack of window and edge snapping are exactly the reason I prefer MacOS behavior. If it did that, partly revealing lower windows would be far more tedious/impossible.

For me, the goal is not to maximize available space to the frontmost windows; it is to maximize the use of the monitor to display what's currently relevant. It allows me to do things like keep a Finder window open with just a bit peeking through to drag things to, keep an eye on a few lines of a terminal tail -f, see the mailbox pane and room pane in Mail/Slack so I can see if anything new happened I should respond to, etc. all while working on whatever I'm working on.

With the Windows-ish "maximize the window", that is replaced, almost invariably, by useless window background.

Again, I expect this is mostly what one is accustomed to, and the Macish approach is more idiosyncratic to the user. Works for me.

Edge snapping does not prevent the behavior you describe; sometimes it even makes it easier to do. You can still rearrange and resize the windows manually as you wish. But when you want two edges to fit snugly, it's easy to do.

Also, you can maximize a window for a moment, look at it, and then unmaximize it back to its previous size.

> Different ways of working, mostly stuck in our own ways of doing things.

I use xfwm4, and turn all of the window snapping off -- unlike Mac and Windows we can customize. ;)

You will pry the Command-key from my cold dead hands:

  /usr/bin/setxkbmap -option ctrl:swap_lalt_lctl

For now, the one pixel resize box is remedied with Ctrl+right mouse button to resize.

A trick is that if you hold option while resizing, it resizes the opposite edge at the same time.

Also, if you hit the up arrow in the command-tab switcher, you can use the arrow keys to select a minimized window and hit enter to restore it.

Here are two window managers for macOS I use:

Tiling window manager: https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

Programmable window manager: https://github.com/kasper/phoenix

As of at least 10.13 (High Sierra), there does appear to be a very modest edge-resistance when placing windows next to each other.

Either that or I've gotten very much better at doing this.

Same in 10.12.

Interesting. Now that you've made me think about it, I've realized that I use Windows more like a single-threaded operating system. I only ever flip between applications (ignoring my second monitor). I never, ever, combine multiple applications on the same monitor - this is crazy because this was the Windows 95 promise. Not that it's a bad thing, I'm used to the workflow and love it.

I absolutely agree with your guess as to why this is.

maximized window ≠ full screen

in Maximized state the window is set to maximal available size (so you are not wasting any part of the screen) while you are still provided with fast and easy access to relevant OS UI elements

in full screen you explicitly tell the system that you don't want to be distracted by OS UI elemtents (typically in situation when you know that you won't need them for extended period of time, or if you REALLY need every single pixel of the screen)

I feel your pain. I was using BetterTouchTool to remap the default behavior of that green +, but eventually decided it was silly to use an add-on for something I should be able to change via `defaults`, so I just trained myself to hit Option when I wanted to maximize.

It's also possible to double click anywhere on the top bar of a window to "maximize."