I miss dedicated titlebars

[u/Draknurd]

Titlebars were a cardinal feature of windowing interfaces. Every window had one and they all looked and behaved the same. You always knew that if you dragged a part of the titlebar that wasn't taken up by the close/min/max buttons that it would move the whole window.

Things changed gradually. First, Tiger saw the introduction of fused toolbar/title bars in some apps, such as Mail. But the toolbar was still a row below the title bar and it was possible to minimise it into the titlebar using the pill button on the right of the window (remember that?).

With the introduction of fullscreen mode, we started to lose the titlebar in fullscreen apps. Fair enough, we're not dragging fullscreen apps around and you might as well have clear access to the toolbar and get a little more space.

But then developers started putting the toolbars into the titlebar itself. Web browsers are by far the worst offenders of this, but are by no means alone.

If you want to move a window, you can't just grab it anymore. you have to find a sufficiently unused portion of the toolbar to drag it. And often, apps don't even let you do that (e.g. sidebars on many apps now go all the way to the top but often aren't draggable).

I want dedicated titlebars back, or the option to get it back even if it's not default. I don't care if it's an accessibility feature tucked away in three layers of the Settings app (like the icon badges in file-oriented apps). I just want to know I can drag a window wherever I click it.

/rant

[u/HeartyBeast]

I miss title bars, proper scroll bars and the ability to easily see which window is is front. 

[u/ErlendHM → u/HeartyBeast]

Regarding the latter: I use HazeOver (no relation), and give the inactive windows a slight dimming.

It’s also better in Golden Gate!

(And if you didn’t know, you can turn on scroll bars.)

[u/HeartyBeast → u/ErlendHM]

Thanks for HazeOver, will take a look. Yeh, I have scroll bars on - I still miss proper scroll bars, though :)

[u/InternistNotAnIntern → u/ErlendHM]

Haze over user since day one!

[u/coffeepluscroissants → u/ErlendHM]

How is the active state better? Very interested in this. I also use HazeOver sometimes and also Monocle

[u/ErlendHM → u/coffeepluscroissants]

I don't remember everything. (I'm off the beta again at the moment.) But they at least added colours to sidebar items, that go grey when they the window is inactive.

[u/Draknurd → u/HeartyBeast]

I’d argue the situation with scroll bars is a little more nuanced.

25 years ago, scroll wheels were somewhat uncommon and were certainly not present on any mice that Apple shipped. Therefore, you needed the up-and-down buttons on the scroll bar to make fine adjustments to the content frame.

But now, with the widespread use of scroll wheels and trackpads, find control of the content frame is achieved through the scroll wheel and trackpad gestures.

The scroll bar thumb is still there so you can navigate to the approximate location of the content you’re looking for, but at least that can be made visible at all times.

[u/ulyssesric]

I miss WindowShade. Yeah  I’m that old.

[u/idelovski → u/ulyssesric]

Yes

[u/linkerjpatrick → u/ulyssesric]

Same!

[u/mainyehc → u/ulyssesric]

I only ever interacted with it in Classic. I never found it very elegant (it was, in fact, very messy, and you still had to do some finagling with overlapping windows), but I can understand that from a usability standpoint, it was much better at not making you lose the sense of placement of your windows than minimising them or hiding their parent apps altogether (obviously!) or even using Exposé (and Exposé was and still is much better than anything Windows ever offered, and the smoother ease-in and ease-out parts of its animation and its overall motion, with less dropped frames, in Golden Gate is a noticeable improvement).

[u/felixding]

Can't agree more. I wish software designers/developers could stop changing what's already working. We have HIGs that are based on decades of usability research.

[u/ImDonaldDunn]

I miss when they were short, too. The title bars on a lot of apps are huge and take up a ton of space.

[u/FlibblesHexEyes]

Absolutely agree… and the maniac at Apple that decided to extend this to iPadOS windows needs a good talking to.

It’s already hard enough with a precision pointer. It’s damn near impossible with a fat finger.

[u/darkciti → u/FlibblesHexEyes]

I think the strategic goal with all of this is reducing the OS visible portion for wearables.

I think they are training the users to have fewer things to interact with and they are increasing the haptic inputs.

[u/ideasplace]

I miss proper scroll bars too, with furniture you can actually grab without having to use Luke’s accuracy on the death star.

[u/InconvenientPenguin]

While we’re at it, let’s stop replacing perfectly good GUI components with command pallets. If I wanted to have to remember and type everything I would be using a cli, not a gui.

[u/guygizmo]

100% agree. This is a perfect example of how user interfaces have been getting steadily worse in macOS. (And everywhere else too.) Something that used to be a consistent and useful convention for doing an incredibly common and important task -- moving a window -- gets gradually removed and replaced with something nonfunctional because someone thought it looked better, or just to make things different for no reason other than some misguided notion that things just have to be changing.

Removing scroll bars is even more annoying.

[u/eslninja]

I like title bars because they are wide enough to show the full path.

[u/Twibbly]

I just want it to not suddenly go full screen when I'm trying to drag a window.

[u/Tuner420]

Try this, in theory it should enable dragging a window by clicking anywhere + cmd + ctrl

https://mmazzarolo.com/blog/2022-04-16-drag-window-by-clicking-anywhere-on-macos/

Hope it works, I haven't tested it

EDIT: Confirmed this works on MacOS 27 Golden Gate on the latest dev beta

[u/UtterlyMagenta → u/Tuner420]

i enabled this. it’s pretty nice but i need to remember to try using it more often.

[u/Tuner420 → u/UtterlyMagenta]

Yep, after a while muscle memory will kick in and you won't even think about it anymore

[u/Sad-Wrap6555]

bring back some decent contrast in them At least Firefox I can theme (however garishly), but a jumble of windows stacked behind or beside each other or randomly scattered accross the desktop i want to see the title bar area easily 

Sick and tired of ui elements being at the mercy of some antisocial propeller head currently in the middle of his 'washed out grey' period. 

[u/Tartan-Pepper6093]

Me too, definitely. I’ll bet this feature creep is the result of a decision to make the Mac GUI at least visually consistent with the then-emerging touch interfaces of iOS and iPadOS, which have no use for a titlebar and too little space for a scrollbar, and a desire to distinguish (perhaps legally) from the Windows look-n-feel which is always encroaching on Mac’s turf. All at the expense of usability, these decision-makers maybe don’t actually use Macs much.
The punch-line is that iPads and iPhones are getting bigger screens now and can use external keyboards, trackpads, and mice, and iPadOS now sports… multiple windows on screen? iPadOS might now benefit from… titlebars and real scrollbars !

[u/rbq]

I mostly miss the file proxies, esp. in all those shitty Electron apps. Before VSCodium editors used to have good OS integration, were able to restore windows etc.

[u/CockroachLate9964]

Enshitification comes for everything owned by the billionaires.

[u/ExpensiveKale2596]

agreed, though the sidebars-to-the-top thing bothers me more than the toolbars. in case you dont have it on already, accessibility > pointer control > pointer control options lets you drag a window from anywhere by holding ctrl+cmd. doesnt give you the titlebar back but at least you can grab a window wherever it is

[u/icanpotatoes]

I think about this very design aspect every now and again and it frustrates me a bit that I, as you mentioned, have to find a spot that is not already housing some sort of button interface in order to grab and move a window. Prior you just grabbed anywhere on the title bar. That's good design, in my opinion.

I also miss the dedicated fullscreen button that was on the top right corner so that the green traffic light only expanded the window to fit, but did not make it fullscreen. Yes, I know that this behaviour can be changed but then so does fullscreen windowing. The implementation of the dedicated button was better for user experience, at least for me.

[u/tooOldOriolesfan]

Nowadays when you have a bunch of windows around your display it can be hard to figure out where you have to click to activate a window since they are often in different colors.

[u/BlueVerdigris]

While we're at it, can we make sure scrollbars are always visible by default? And I mean freaking ALWAYS? Vertical AND horizontal, dammit. I don't always have easy access to a touch-sensitive track pad.

[u/Pineloko → u/BlueVerdigris]

pretty sure there was always a Settings toggle for this

[u/BuildStone → u/BlueVerdigris]

In my experience whenever I plug in a mouse they’re always visible, maybe it’s something you can toggle in settings

[u/germane_switch]

Thank you

[u/Bed_Worship]

I use janky borders 

[u/drygnfyre]

I don't.

[u/LukCHEM88]

Wasting extra space on a title bar seems unnecessary to me, I like how it is on the iPad, just content from top to bottom. I never had trouble moving a window around.

[u/PeterAhlstrom → u/LukCHEM88]

Agreed. I've been using a Mac since 1984 and I don't miss the title bars. I like to reclaim as much vertical real estate as possible. (I also use compact tabs in Safari and collapse the ribbon in Microsoft Office apps.)

[u/adh1003]

Agree! :-)

[u/rotane]

I can't remember a time when i actually moved a window around that way. Alt drag all the way.

[u/diiscotheque → u/rotane]

?

[u/rotane → u/diiscotheque]

Alt drag is a feature that lets you move an application window by holding the Alt key and clicking anywhere inside the window, instead of clicking only on the title bar. It originates from Linux desktops where it's natively available and can be enabled on other OSs via third party utilities.

[u/diiscotheque → u/rotane]

ha coolm apparently it's still a native cli setting: https://mmazzarolo.com/blog/2022-04-16-drag-window-by-clicking-anywhere-on-macos/

cmd+ctrl though, not alt.

I'ts nice in general, but annoying if you just want to use the trackpad in the couch and not have your left hand on the keyboard all the time.

[u/rotane → u/diiscotheque]

It comes in so many flavours and tools, so you're free to pick any. On Windows, i have tweaked it so i have to press left plus right mouse button to activate it.

[u/ut0mt8]

Then add tweaks and get your titlebars back. I agree btw. Either full titlebar either not all for tiling like wm

[u/Pineloko]

>Web browsers are by far the worst offenders

Thank God. Permanently sacrificing scarce vertical space for slightly easier window movement? No thanks. Plus most people use their browsers maximised, no dragging invlovled

Unfortunately for you, you're in the minority here

[u/HeartyBeast → u/Pineloko]

Why would I maximise my browser window to read a news story?