Over time, you may discover one of the biggest truth about computing - the immense (and sadly disregarded) value of plain text¹. Code is nothing but structured text. The cardinal job of a programmer is text manipulation.
I'm reading this thread in my editor. Why? Because I'm dealing with text - browsers are great for presentation of text, not so nice for manipulating it. What kind of manipulations? Well, I can find, sort, group, narrow, collapse/expand, translate, extract summaries for paragraphs, find all the URLs (including matching a pattern), etc. Good luck doing all that in the browser - even with the extensions.
Most developers don't even get annoyed by seemingly small things. Like how often do you need to bring the url of a given browser tab into your editor? Simplest thing, yet do it dozens of times a day and it gets vexing. For me - it takes milliseconds and a keypress - it even extracts the URL description and converts the link to markdown (if needed).
Or another example - whenever someone's screen sharing, or I'm watching a video and they show a piece of text (let's just for consistency say a url). How would you normally extract it? e.g, for your notes. For me - it takes selecting a region of screen and a keypress - my editor calls a CLI OCRing tool and voila. I don't really care that the source isn't "technically speaking" text - if I can read it, then computer for sure can "read" it too, am I right? That's text manipulation.
There may be dozens (if not hundreds) of such examples (including coding-related) in my workflow that work on top of the idea of manipulating plain text.
Once you grok the cerebral virtue of the idea of having complete and total control over text, you may find that modal editors - nvim/emacs/etc. - are the best instruments to achieve that control.
Learning modal editor - vim, nvim, emacs is like skiing or snowboarding. For anyone uninitiated this whole endeavor may seem dumb - you have to spend so much money, time and effort, so you can just descent from a mountain peak to its base on a piece of wood? Absurdly bananas.
Some may even try hitting the greenest, flattest, most beginner-friendly slopes with great confidence, only to find themselves face down in the snow minutes after getting on the lift. They try again. Sometimes, falling for the fourth or fifth time reinforces their belief that it's really is dumb and they just quit at that point.
Some newbie skiers, after a few successful runs, get overly excited and head to the lift for the steeper slope, only to regret their decision. If falling all the way down doesn't make them quit, they may eventually start enjoying it.
At some point, they'd gain so much experience - their movements become smooth and graceful, their speed intimidating. Suddenly, they'd discover an enormous, indescribable feeling of joy. There's so much tacit - emotional, mental and physical enlightenment that is almost impossible to convey to another soul who's never experienced it or rose to that level.
Then there's a spectrum of differences - some still fall all the time yet enjoy it nonetheless, and they enthusiastically discuss with other beginner skiers how awesome they feel. Some, after mastering the most difficult carving techniques, somehow forget their own beginner's journey and become apathetic toward rookies.
So, then why ski [vim] at all? Well, it is truly one of the most efficient, fastest, healthy ways of getting back to the base [dealing with text]. But most importantly it's tremendously fun. Often, in quite indescribable ways. I'm afraid you would never understand the appeal until you do try it. But even then, it's never guaranteed you'd find that thrill; then maybe skiing [vimming] isn't for you. Even though these activities literally for everyone (unless they have physical/mental barriers).
I honestly can't take seriously any programmer who doesn't know the basics of vim - doesn't that suggest they've never used sed, less, or read through man pages? Have they never had to ssh to a remote machine in the terminal? I do though get it, when people say "I tried it and ain't for me". I suppose, it just means they've never hit the spot that inspired them to keep going.
Except Emacs doesn't have "plugins". They are called "packages" and not plugins for specific reasons - they are more like libraries than plugins. In Emacs, one can change/override the behavior of any function (built-in or third party) with some enormous flexibility not easily achievable in other editors.
If humans gravitated towards choosing logical paths instead of following emotions, they would be equally miserable, with the difference of added awareness - they'd still be miserable yet know why.
It makes me sad to watch how some of the smartest and most resourceful programmers on the planet just keep ignoring the immense power, liberation, and joy that knowing some Lisp can grant you. Reminds me the quote from Idiocracy - "for the smartest guy in the world, you're pretty dumb sometimes"...
Org-mode does have certain fragmentation - every Emacs config for Org-mode is different from another - there are entire packages built on top (and they drastically can change the behavior of entire system) - Org-Roam, Howm, Denote, Org-supertag, etc. Also, for what it is made for, Org-mode is widely successful - there's really not a single contender that can be used alternatively, there's literally no good replacement for it.
Comparing Markdown and Org-mode really makes no sense - different ideas, with different design goals, use cases and applications.
One of the most annoying things after installing Tahoe for me, that for no good reason an ordinary app would randomly lose its focus. In the midst of my typing. This is unbelievably preposterous and I just can't stop hating Apple for this crap. How the fuck this is acceptable? I just have no words. What makes it even worse that I couldn't even complain about it on their support pages - they just keep removing my comments for being "non-constructive". This is some random bug, and many people have complained about it, how am I suppose to make it "more constructive"? Send them the exact configuration of constellations, the number of monitors I use and their positioning angles, log the keyboard rate and delay, the latency, the level of magnetic interference caused by my Bluetooth devices, etc.?
That is incidentally one of the many papercuts that are widely accepted in Windows, but never were a problem on a mac.
Don’t try to interact with a windows desktop while it is still booting up. Better to wait for everything to settle down, otherwise apps will constantly snatch away focus and your typing will go into random applications.
I work on a desktop Windows/Mac application that takes forever and a day to launch (CAD package), and pops up a million pop-ups during the process. I try to get minor admin tasks done while it is compiling/launching, but it steals focus every 10 seconds!
Windows 11 also broke the active window from focusing when waking from sleep. Whenever I wake my PC, no window is active. I'll still have a fullscreen Chrome or whatever, but if I try to do Ctrl+T to open a tab nothing happens because nothing is in focus. I have to Alt+Tab once to bring it into focus.
Change the ForegroundLockTimeout registry setting to increase the timeout, or you can set it to the max integer value to never let the app steal the focus.
by default if you haven't typed anything for a little bit Windows allows an application to steal focus. If you change that value you can prevent windows from ever stealing focus or change how long they have to wait before they're allowed to.
I recently built a windows PC again for gaming. Haven't used one for years. Everything's fresh, loads of room on hard drives etc and still sometimes it'll just be weird and needs a reset. But it doesn't surprise me, it's sad we've come to tolerate that from the world's most popular OS.
As an aside, unless you are playing games that need NT kernel anticheat or are using a store other than steam, odds are the overall experience and performance is better on linux at this point.
And even Mac is doing well with games, most of my library runs natively. Baldurs Gate 3 runs better on the newer Apple chips than my somewhat aging gaming PC.
Yeah it's just the kernel anti-cheat now which is keeping me on windows. I'm fully ready to swap to linux but unfortunately I do like to play games that need it.
I have a Windows 11, macOS and Ubuntu Desktop VM that I alternate across throughout the week, I find I need to reset all three periodically to sort out random weirdness. It has more to do with which machine I've used most in the last few weeks not which OS is in-use in my experience.
I have the same setup, just Arch instead of ubuntu on my laptop and I very rarely have any issues (like maybe once per month) that require me to reboot.
Familiarity might be the biggest differentiator. I switch between windows on my work computer and fedora gnome on my personal computer (and only interact with Debian server over ssh) so I am more at ease on Windows than I am with something like cachy OS and KDE.
I have Win10, mac and Ubuntu, in 3 different machines I'm using constantly. None of them is perfect, but windows is just infuriating, macos in the middle, and I can more or less live with ubuntu...
Wikipedia claims that Android "has the largest installed base of any operating system in the world", if you're going to measure popularity that way.
(Of course it's hard to know how to define an OS. Is Android a kind of Linux? Are the various things called "Windows" or "MacOS" to be regarded as different versions of the same OS just because marketing people decided to use the same name? If not, how much similarity in code or design is required?)
Can you even consider Android a singular OS? I personally don't in the same way I don't consider Fedora and Ubuntu the same OS, and there's far more differences between something like HyperOS and AOSP/PixelUI as there is between Ubuntu and Fedora.
Did the same just end of last year, NVME drive, gobs of RAM, and yet... sometimes the whole UI freezes solid for multiple seconds at a time when I close one out of my 30-40 Chrome tabs. I know it's not a cheap app to run, but this doesn't happen on MacOS.
Check/change your ForegroundLockTimeout registry value.
by default if you haven't typed anything for a little bit Windows allows an application to steal focus. If you change that value you can prevent windows from ever stealing focus or change how long they have to wait before they're allowed to.
I've been beefing about this for decades; X Window didn't do this by default and you could adjust window manager behavior however you liked to prevent windows stealing focus in X, even for newly realized windows. Microsoft Windows decided for some reason the newest window gets focus, which is annoying as heck. I really don't want my attention involuntarily switched because my window manager things it knows better than I do where I should be looking.
You want to change the
ForegroundLockTimeout registry key or set it via power shell.
by default if you haven't typed anything for a little bit Windows allows an application to steal focus. If you change that value you can prevent windows from ever stealing focus or change how long they have to wait before they're allowed to.
Windows has a ton of little settings you can tweak like this if it's not working quite how you like it.
I personally tweak it the other way to allow a window to pop up and still focus sooner .
If you set up via PowerShell you can do it more dynamically and if you're doing it via the API there's behavior in there too force a lock
I remember using the NT5 betas (that became Win2k) and being so pleased that the focus (not) stealing was working much better. They "fixed" that for the final release
Macs have largely been the same.
It is just a matter of buzy compute and letting all the accumulated tasks complete.
When you buy powerfull computers, this problem basically doesn't exist, both on Windows or macOS.
Since Macs have historically been more expensive and premium, even the cheaper model was powerfull enough to finish the boot sequence fast enough that the desktop would feel snappy almost instantly.
On the other hand, cheap PCs struggle to accomplish every task in a timely manner.
I am amazed about how stupid and ignorant is the average Mac fanboy. I have been a Mac user first and foremost, but you guys are just full of shit.
The support pages are not for you to contact Apple. They are there for users to help other users. The cynical person would say they are there to get unpaid labor from other users so Apple can spend less on support.
If you want to report something to Apple you use the "Feedback Assistant App"
As an Easter egg, I wonder if they can make it accept input in stdin and just discard it. If I was working there and didn’t mind burning some bridges (I’m not sure how many people would get wind of it as it’s quite obscure) I would be tempted to implement it.
There's a bunch of hyperactive people in those Apple "support" forums who don't actually help anyone. They respond to almost every discussion thread aggressively deflecting any criticism directed at Apple.
They pretend to offer "solutions" so their posts don't come across as unconstructive, but their solutions are always essentially the same, often culminating in a factory reset. There is never any attempt to get to the bottom of anything or diagnose what the actual issue is.
They are volunteering their time to make people shut up, bow their head in shame and go away. I don't think this is what you want in an open source project.
Indeed. Apple should close those forums. It damages their brand to have such antagonistic people pretending to be support agents. A company of Apple's wealth could afford to have a small army of people in the Philippines do the same job with much less aggression.
>”… Now, the few Apple engineers that get back to me for some of these issues and the Apple support as well often tell me that Apple really cares about customer feedback. I really want to believe this ... but it's so hard to believe it, if less than 1% of my submitted reports (yes, less than 1%, and it's probably much less) ever gets a response. A response, if it ever comes, can come after 3 months, or after 1 year, or after 3 years; only rarely does it come within 1 month. To some of the feedbacks, after getting a response from the Apple engineers, I responded, among other things, by asking if I'm doing something wrong with the way I submit the feedback reports. Because if I do something wrong, then that could be the reason why only so few of them are considered by the Apple engineers. But I never got any answer to that. I told them that it's frustrating sending so much feedback without ever knowing if it's helpful or not, and never got an answer. …”
In my exp. their _support_ is fantastic which is another reason it’s odd they will simply leave countless _feedback_ submissions open nearly indefinitely. They ignore their free laborers!
Wholeheartedly agree. The few times in my life that I’ve bothered to post there with a problem, it’s been all the more upsetting that the patronizing generic advice and scolding of the frustrated users, is coming from random volunteer fanbois on the Internet, not even paid Apple staff who contractually have to be positive about Apple. A company with such rabidly loyal supporters shouldn’t deploy them like this. And if it was wise back in 2010 when Apple software was for the most part quite good… it sure isn’t wise now when they’re reaching what I hope is a temporary nadir in quality.
Tim Cook runs a well oiled machine. At some point, leadership will change. And I don’t think it is as simple as, “Just keep going what Tim was doing.” There are so many moving parts that it is nigh certain Apple will go through a period of brand damage when things begin to fall through the cracks. Will that fall be dramatic? Probably not. But I think you underestimate just how much a shift in leadership can tip the scales.
At least you know it’s not working as place to submit issue reports. It is better than other way, like Figma, 1Password and many others: a Support Forum with an army of yes-men “support specialists”. They would answer your query with basic troubleshooting and then will say that it will be passed to development team or will be considered, etc.
perfectly designed system to pacify user and dismiss their report.
Yes, fanbois, lecturing people that they're using it wrong.
It's not just on Apple's forums, Microsoft has the same kind of guys. They tend to look really popular too because all the other fanbois upvote their comments.
And not only there, many open-source software forums have the same problem.
Are those the people who recommend "fixes" like resetting the PRAM / NVRAM to solve application level issues, or who recommend removing all files from the Desktop to somehow speed up general responsiveness? The Apple pages are awash with them.
I wonder if other cult brands attract the same kind of personalities, or if Apple has somehow done something special to encourage it. When a Harley Davidson owner says he has a problem with his bike, do Harley zealots jump out of the woodwork to attack the dissenter and defend the brand from which they derive their personality?
“ When a Harley Davidson owner says he has a problem with his bike, do Harley zealots jump out of the woodwork to attack the dissenter and defend the brand from which they derive their personality?”
I’m no Harley owner but you and I both know the answer to that.
Honestly I'm not sure. Motorcycle interest might select against relevant personality traits/disorders. Maybe they bond over commiseration over Harley's decline (a narrative I've heard of)
This shows up in a lot of other areas, like small game companies that have a devoted following. It can get pretty nasty because these types of people are able to be condescending just short of ToS, while baiting other people into crossing the line. A common thread is weak moderation or biased moderation.
As a developer, it's easy to be blind to this because they're on "your side", but it's bad for the health of your support forums.
For Windows support I assume it accrues some benefit to the unpaid support, like it contributes to them getting their Microsoft Certified Windows End User Support Helpful Guy badge.
Then we would have zero support, or they would shut down the forums entirely. Or are you implying that the companies would be forced to finally offer official support?
There is official support. Apple Support should be more deluged with callers, but they rely on these forum mod suckers to carry water for them and tell people it’s their fault to lessen that load.
This is starting to make sense. In the past I've been confused at a seemingly useful question thread there and the answer from some other user there with some like "top support user" badge or something, is just not an answer at all, and then the thread gets locked because they deemed it resolved.
lol. Can't tell you how many times I've clicked "I have this problem too" on a page where users can't help each other because apple is doing/hiding something stupid.
My MacBook is corporate, and it's therefore loaded with a ton of corporate auto-update, VPN and apparently questionnaire software. Stuff pops up at the most annoying times. And sometimes, indeed it takes focus away from the thing I'm currently typing. Extremely annoying.
But apparently Apple is not the only offender. Just as I was typing this (on Harmonic on Android), a popup popped up, ate a few of the characters I typed and disappeared again. No idea what it said. Why do people do this? Don't hijack let applications I didn't ask for hijack my input.
I wonder whether this could be a touchpad malfunction, causing phantom clicks that move focus. To diagnose, you could temporarily disable it and use an external mouse.
I once had a vexing problem with my old Intel MacBook — macOS failed to boot, but Windows seemed totally normal. Can't possibly be a hardware failure, right? The symptoms disappeared after replacing the SATA cable!
This reminds of the infamous GPU issues of the unibody models (the last non-retina ones). I have one such 2012 15" MBP which has a dedicated GPU which, as I understand it, has developed soldering issues.
Non-Mac OSs don't know how to turn this GPU on out of the box, so it just sits there without bothering anybody. But, for some reason, MacOS turns it on and it craps the bed, rendering the machine unusable.
I had the 2010 version of this model, with the same symptoms starting in mid 2011. I would get 5-8 crashes a day from the GPU being on the fritz.
Apple ended up replacing the mainboard in a free out-of-AppleCare repair. I never had the problem again and I used the machine regularly until about 2018.
In my case, it lasted one or two more years, and I only learned about the repair after they stopped offering it. By that time, the machine had already been replaced for other, unrelated reasons.
Depends on the mice. As a sibling says, Logitech mice with their drivers work great. The app isn't great and loads a boatload of javascript crap. Can't vouch for bettermouse, never tried it.
Another option which sidesteps the Logi Options crap is Logitech "gaming" mice. These have an integrated memory that actually remembers the configuration set by the driver. So, you only have to put up with the shitty experience once, and then the mouse remembers those settings wherever you use it. Some models can actually remember multiple setting sets.
One of my best mice is a G700s. I haven't used the Logitech G crap in like... ten years? The mouse is still going strong. Its only issue is that it goes through batteries like a hot knife through butter. I like it so much, I actually bought a second one for work. Got it used, since they weren't making them anymore.
That's not macos fault in this case, it's just that Logitech mouses (MX Master at least) doesn't act well at all without driver. Like, for scrolling, it's like the mouse is sending raw smooth scrolling each time you just touch the wheel and without the driver that presumably fake it on the computer side, there is no synchronisation between your actual scroll and the steps you physically feel in the wheel.
Not sure why this is getting downvotes, it's absolutely true. For a very long time you couldn't even set different scroll directions for external mice and the touchpad - even if it's (maybe? I forget) supported now it's always been an area Apple didn't care about and was far behind Windows and Linux.
I assume it’s getting down votes because it’s off-topic. The parent comment was suggesting external mice as a temporary measure to debug the intermittent issue they’re facing.
Whether or not external micr suck on MacOS doesn’t really matter. The objective was to diagnose an issue.
Well, if the suggestion is to use an alternative for a while to diagnose an issue that causes equivalent or even worse issues, then it might not be(come) very debuggable.
Recent switcher to macos. I can't find a way to separately set mouse acceleration and scroll wheel momentum.
I use a trackball for RSI reasons, in order to get across the screen in a single flick means high sensitivity, mouse acceleration is absolutely needed to be able to make small movements. This makes my scroll wheel useless because a single scroll moves the page about 1/10 of a line
I will pile on here and claim Apple is shockingly hostile to accessibility. From the weird way tabs work for focus to the limited options for text clarity, to the lack of control for mice customization, it feels like it has been a low item on their priorities for some time.
That was my experience as well. macOS adopted the iOS UI pattern of list cells using a swipe gesture to show a delete button and other actions. This doesn’t work with mouse and you have to use the right click context menu. This is a constant annoyance when switching between the Mac with an external mouse and the one with a trackpad, as it breaks your muscle memory.
Another comment suggests that third-party tools are still required and that Apple still hasn't added support for this, which makes me wonder if anyone at Apple uses an external mouse or if this is a scenario they literally don't care about.
I loved my Performance MX. I finally had to replace it at work (software wouldn't install after migrating to Windows 11) and the MX Master 3 I got seems much ergonomically worse to me. I also am not a fan of the thumb wheel replacing buttons. Only thing I won't complain about is that the resolution is better. From testing my coworkers' mouses (older Masters) I'm pretty sure they have each been a step downhill from my perspective.
My sister in law gave me her G700S to fix the main button microswitches, and she convinced me that it's the apotheosis of the design - it's what should have replaced the Performance MX. No soft-touch plastic, extra buttons, and the higher resolution sensor. I'll probably have to get one off eBay.
Edit: also all of the Masters have non-user-replaceable batteries.
But the battery only lasts a day or two. The G604 is almost as nice, but battery lasts weeks. But it will likewise need switch replacements before long and is likewise no longer made. None of Logitech's current mice fill the same niche. Why do they discontinue their most popular mice without replacing them? Who can say. I'm pretty confident a direct 700/604 replacement with better switches would sell well.
Yes, but the battery is standard and easily replaceable.
My main gripe with the G700s is the weight, although it's not much heavier than the mx master 3. It also helps to have a great mousepad, or else I get tired of pushing that brick around. There are also aftermarket pads if you use it on the desk and they wear. I haven't tried any, though, my pads are still fine.
I have a 20-year-old hard plastic gaming mouse pad I use at home and it's terrific. At work I have some promotional neoprene covered pad with a terrible Qi charger on one side. The mouse pad similarly works great. The biggest annoyance I have with these things is that I have replaced the switches on all of them, the process of which tends to destroy the skates. None of the replacement skate kits ($10, highway robbery) on eBay or Amazon or whatever include the thick adhesive like the originals, and all the foam tape I can find is too thick, so I've taken to building up layers of double sided tape until they are both even and proud of the recesses in the mouse. This isn't exactly a criticism of Logitech except that they could absolutely sell repair parts for their peripherals and they don't.
I can't say I like the 604 from looking at it, but that's a pretty surface level judgment and I'd have to use it to really compare. For my purposes a rechargeable mouse that lasts more than a day is fine because I'm using this at work and I just plug it in when I leave. Having a replaceable rechargeable battery also means if it starts running out of juice before one day I can just pop in a new battery and it'll be good for a couple more years.
G604s are pretty annoying to open up but if you don't want to solder on eBay they have full replacement boards that you can just drop in that have new switches already soldered in there for you.
It has just stopped holding charge. It can be 100% charged according to Solaar, unplug the cable and it is discharged in < 1 minute. Warranty replacement on the way.
You have to use third party software to configure them properly, then they work fine. I used logitech’s drivers for a while but they’ve become the biggest pile of garbage I have ever seen call itself a driver. I now use BetterMouse instead.
Focus stealing has been an issue in windowed multi-tasking environments from the beginning. It's certainly been an issue in all macOS/OS X versions I've used since I started in 2011.
Agreed. Since sharing input between multiple applications (and the OS services) is its primary role, you would think that UI designers would have “thou shalt not steal focus” as a commandment, but that is not the case.
My latest version of the problem is with Ubuntu Gnome. Upgrade software and, later, you will be interrupted with a pop-up window to enter your system password. Not only is this an interruption, I’m always doubtful that this is the system asking for a sudoer password!
UIs, in my experience, are very bad at handling “interrupts”. Sorry, my dad designed chips, so I use that hardware term when talking about notifications and other times another application needs to notify or get the input from user. Personally, I’d have the UI change the color/texture of the system menubar/taskbar and wait for the user to click it.
I've been using windowed multi-tasking environments since 1986. Never been a problem for me (SunOS -> Solaris -> Linux). I rely very, very, very much on focus-follows-mouse.
Dont get me started on the number of times Signal/formerly Skype opened up a dialog in-the-midst of me typing and me accidentally accepting a call because i happened to write 'space' at that moment in time
I looked into this and the issue is the inbuilt SecurityAgent briefly taking focus. For me I believe it’s related to some management setting our company has added not getting on with Tahoe.
Tahoe made at least one undocumented change to timer events in the GUI. This resulted in a difficult to debug problem in solvespace. I suspect we were doing something "wrong" and had to correct it, but the fact remains they made a change to how some GUI events work and didn't tell anyone.
> how am I suppose to make it "more constructive"?
Obviously by shutting the hell up, you ungrateful serf. The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Seriously, though, if you want this to stop, people like you are going to have to start voting with their wallets.
I finally pulled the plug on macOS a couple years ago for Linux, and I haven't been unhappy about it. However, I did make a point of buying a laptop that was well supported on Linux (a Lenovo X1 Carbon that was in the same price class as an equivalent Mac).
I did the same a decade ago, and I've been fully content with my Linux-only life - but a new MacBook recently arrived along with a new job, so now I'm using Tahoe whether I like it or not. It's generally difficult to vote with someone else's wallet.
Well, be glad you're working for a company that is still willing to stump up properly for hardware.
Too many companies are balking at spending money on hardware right now. While I would love to think that this will drive Linux adoption, it probably won't. Microsoft is going to cave on TPM 2.0 for Windows 11 or extend Windows 10 support much further.
It will be interesting to see how RAM prices affect the behavior of all companies.
I wouldn't mind if this finally lights a fire under certain software companies to also actually optimize their shit for memory use, but... I'm not that optimistic.
I can't speak for all companies, but the feeling I get from mine is that the issue is more about the maintenance and support for Mac rather than the little extra spend to get a MacBook pro instead of the standard windows box.
Happened to me many times. As my other colleagues, I ran a Linux VM inside macOS. The overhead is not that large and is totally worth the sanity. Of course I had to use a few corporate-managed macOS apps, like Zoom, or Outlook, but this is not a very big deal.
It's literally impossible to run docker containers on mac without virtualization. An IT dept that forbade developers with macs from virtualizing would be facing a lack of developement in any company using docker/k8s
I’m in the same situation, have to use Mac for SOC2 reasons after having used Linux for 10 years. The apps are fine, it’s the KDE window management I miss the most, and a VM won’t really help there.
Why, running KDE in VirtualBox in full-screen mode must be fine :) At least, I did it breathlessly with Xfce, on much older Apple hardware, and it was... just fine.
(OTOH running text-mode Emacs from a headless VM in a full-screen built-in Terminal may suddenly feel sluggish. Kitty or WezTerm solves this.)
> people like you are going to have to start voting with their wallets.
You think I CHOSE to be miserable? Sorry, I have kids, and you know, they don't exactly live on dog food, but even that costs money. My job requires me to use a Mac. And please don't tell me to "find a better job". I've been programming for over twenty years, only once I was given a clearance to pick "whatever kind of machine you want". For my personal computing I do use Linux.
Random possibility - if you have Bartender installed, it's buggy as shit on Tahoe, and has some really weird stuff it does with hiding the cursor and otherwise changing the focus around. I haven't switched off yet because the alternatives don't anywhere near as much functionality, but I probably will at some point soon, because while the updates have made it somewhat better it's still a pretty terrible experience at times.
Never heard of Bartender before, seems to be this:
> superpowered your menu bar, giving you total control over your menu bar items, what's displayed, and when, with menu bar items only showing when you need them.
Which also, for some reason has permission to record your desktop and recently had a change of owner? I'd be reformatting my computer so quickly if I found this out about software on my computer...
I replied to the parent post, but in short, I used it through a subscription service that specifically didn’t update until the ownership issues were clarified to their (and ultimately my) satisfaction.
The screen recording permissions are needed for it to be aware of when menu bar icons update so it can move them in and out of the menu bar; I believe later versions allow you to skip screen recording permissions if you’re willing to forgo that feature.
Yep, I’m aware of the (incredibly-poorly-handled) change of ownership. I’ve been using it through a SetApp[1] subscription, and they stayed on the pre-acquisition version for quite a while; long enough that enough details came out about the new owner and I felt _relatively_ okay with continuing to use it after it got updates, especially going through another party. The Tahoe issues are making me rethink that heavily now - but the alternatives I briefly looked at when I upgraded to Tahoe all seemed incredibly lacking in one way or another, and I haven’t wanted to blow up my menu bar yet again :/
Oh decent timing, this happened to me first time today, I even looked down at the track pad to see if my hand was close enough to accidentally swipe it because I felt it wasn't
Do you have a logitech mouse? If so you need to reinstall the logi and/or G Hub apps. The cert changed and that's what's causing it to fail and keep grabbing focus away. Incredibly strange bug.
I had the same issue, and in my case it turned out it was caused by Logitech G Hub which was running in the background. I uninstalled it and did not experience the issue again. My suggestion is to check any background process that might be doing that.
I had this, it was our company's security software prompting an update (Admin by Request) that was getting hidden. An update to that software and the latest tahoe update seems to have resolved that issue.
> One of the most annoying things after installing Tahoe for me, that for no good reason an ordinary app would randomly lose its focus. In the midst of my typing.
I updated to iPadOS 26 on my iPad Pro, opened Safari, and tried to log into a website. For some reason the full-screen keyboard didn't load, all I could get was a miniature thing that floated on the left part of the screen (like the two-handed layout but with the full keyboard in one half, like typing on an iPhone 5s).
The memes about Steve Jobs turning in his grave are true. He would not have stood for slop like this for even a moment. Apple's quality game was miles higher back in the day.
Even if they tried to do some kind of Snow Leopard maintenance release for all of their products, I don't think they could raise the bar on quality high enough in just a single release. They'd have to do it a few times with nothing new to show for it.
This speaks nothing of the transition to MacOS looking more and more like a dysfunctional toy since Jony Ive left and Alan Dye took over.
I appreciate your frustration, but at the same time what is Apple supposed to do? If it's affecting only a tiny number of users, and you just happen to be an unlucky one, and they don't know how to reproduce it, and you can't help them reproduce it, then what? I think they just have to wait until somebody (such as yourself) is able to figure out with some kind of logging what is happening. E.g. the first question to answer is probably what actually gets the focus, if anything? To produce a bug report that at least suggests which area of code might be responsible.
I had a similar problem at one point, then finally figured out it was when I accidentally hit the fn button which triggered the emoji picker window and moved focus to it (IIRC), but it was off-screen because I'd previously used it on a secondary monitor. Reconnecting the monitor and moving the window back to my primary display fixed it. (Obviously, it's a bug to show a picker window outside of visible coordinates, and I think it got fixed eventually.)
But it also might not be Apple at all, if it's some third-party background utility with a bug. E.g. if that were happening to me, my first thought would be that it might be a Logitech bug or a Karabiner-Elements bug. Uninstalling any non-Apple background processes or utilities seems like a necessary first step.
They could throw some small portion of their billions of dollars into proper quality control and reproduce it themselves if they wanted to. It’s an industry-wide malaise, but it isn’t inevitable. It’s amazing that every year it becomes more and more economically nonviable for basic shit to meet the most modest standards of usability, yet we can use the power consumption of a small country to have Copilot in Notepad.
The way I see it, money can’t buy one of the most important ingredients: the motivation to do the best work of your life. No matter how much cash you throw at a problem, you’re likely just going to get people who want to "do their job" from 9 to 5. Those are exactly the kind of workers that companies like the Apple of 2026 are looking for. It’s a big ship, and it needs to stay steady and predictable. People who want to achieve something "insanely great" or "make a dent in the universe" are just a distraction.
In my experience, shipping a product as polished as Mac OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard requires a painful level of dedication from everyone involved, not just Quality Assurance.
As long as neither the New York Times nor the Wall Street Journal writes about how bad Apple’s software has gotten, there’s even no reason for them to think about changing their approach.
The drama surrounding Apple’s software quality isn’t showing up in their earnings. And at the end of the day, those earnings are the "high order bit," no matter what marketing tries to tell us.
Well, if there's one thing history has shown us (including the history of Apple's own insurgency against the PC), it's that complacency and stagnation make the incumbent a target for every newcomer who does have the drive to make a dent in the universe. And there are always a lot of people with that drive. This is how we keep ending up in the cycle of chaos > new paradigm > perfect software that probably should not be improved upon > collapse under weight of new features > chaos > new paradigm... repeat.
> They could throw some small portion of their billions of dollars into proper quality control and reproduce it themselves if they wanted to.
How?
How do you reproduce something when you have no idea of the cause and it's not happening on any of your machines?
And remember they don't have just this one unreproducible bug reported. They have thousands.
If you have experience writing software, you're going to end up with a lot of unreproducible bug reports. They're a genuine challenge for everyone, not just Apple.
Windows has had a “prevent apps from stealing focus” option for at least a decade. It was one of the things that I still dislike the most about macOS, and Apple can absolutely address this.
Windows has no such option, and regularly steals focus, particularly Visual Studio/Debug tools/applications loading. It had an option for a short period with the original TweakUI, but Microsoft removed support for it even in the registry.
No OS should steal focus, Windows absolutely is guilty of it.
I've found that the login dialog in Win 11 no longer consistently takes focus on the password field. Really annoying to login blind and find your typing was rejected because it doesn't do the sensible thing any more.
When I hit Win+L to lock my screen and come back 4 hours later to input my pin, I turn on my monitor (that I turned off because every 5 minutes Windows turns it on and off again), push esc or Ctrl a few times to clear off the image, and start typing in my PIN. 90% of the time by the time my monitor displays the picture, it's sitting at the unlock screen with the last 2 digits of my 4-digit PIN
Windows itself isn't guilty of this in my experience (lifetime of use until Linux switch last year), but other apps like shitty Akamai. Some years ago a coworker wrote this blog post and a simple tool to find out which programs are doing it: https://forwardscattering.org/post/30
Windows is absolutely guilty of this, and it is trivial to reproduce.
Reproduction steps:
- Start a reply to this comment in your browser, type some example words.
- Create a BAT file with the following contents:
@echo off
timeout /t 15 /nobreak >nul
start notepad.exe
- Run the BAT file.
- Immediately switch back to the browser tab, and place your focus into the HN reply box. Type a word.
- Wait for notepad to open
- Continue typing. Your typing will go into Notepad and not the browser tab you had focused last.
This occurs commonly and continuously on Windows, it is damn obnoxious. The OS should never ever change focus, it should however flash the window/taskbar, that is acceptable, but not shift my typing into whatever arbitrary program opened. This used to be fixable via "ForegroundLockTimeout" which is what classic TweakUI altered, but was killed in Vista.
If you're a Visual Studio user, it is a daily annoyance. You hit Start/Play, go about your work, and then suddenly some time later focus shifts out from under you.
I'm running Windows (25H2, 26200.7462). I used the batch file you pasted and tried your repro steps, multiple times (I started writing this comment, in fact). It didn't steal focus. (Edit: See below). I'm quite sure that I haven't had a steal-focus issue at the OS level for many years, and I use Windows all day, every day. I'm also a Visual Studio user.
Edit: I tried it with Firefox and got a repro there. No stealing with Edge.
GNOME on Linux prevents it. You get a notification "Discord updater is ready" instead which you can activate if you want to give it focus - which I never do. F the Discord updater.
When you launch an application or open a dialog, you expect the new window to "steal" focus. When you close a dialog, you expect focus to go back to the main window. If it didn't, it would impair usability.
So how would an OS decide when "stealing focus" is allowed and when it is not?
Like, I'm frustrated with it too. I hate when an app pops up a dialog while I'm typing and my next keystroke dismisses it and I have no idea what I've done. But at the same time, I'd hate to have to manually switch focus to a pop-up dialog every single time before dismissing it with Enter or Escape too -- that would be way too annoying in the other direction.
I can tell you bartender 6 has been perpetually broken since release and does this. I finally gave up on it after the devs sent me “fixes” that never fixed anything.
Exactly. They're just acting like Trump during the pandemic - "no testing - no cases..." Why not just keep the posts and allow people exchange ideas for workarounds?
Apple has had 30 years to make UI focus and input stable, and not let something invisible steal input focus.
Fortunately for mac, this is much worse on Windows.
This seems like an example of a situation that modern machine learning could help with. Take bug reports permissively and look through all of them for patterns. Loss of focus should be the kind of thing that would stand out and could be analyzed for similarities and recurring features. Making sense of large amounts of often vague and rambling reports has been a problem for a long time and seems like a domain that machine learning is well set for.
Sure - florists, influencers and soccer moms don't use Org-mode. Real hackers do, because it is extremely developer-oriented. And of course it won't ever be more popular, simply because there are far more soccer moms in the world and not too many hackers.
To be clear: I mean "no one uses org mode" hyperbolically, but there's a causative reason why markdown's popularity has led to twenty variants: When a ton of people use anything, it often needs to be tweaked to fit many different use-cases. If orgmode had the popularity that markdown had, it would also have twenty variants; its characteristic of being highly consistent is not a reflection of some internal design or authority that aligns it toward consistency; its a reflection of dispopularity.
I am aware of no evidence supporting the claim that orgmode is more developer-oriented than markdown. It is identical to markdown in ~80% of the formatting directives people widely use. The remaining ~20% are mostly stylistic choices (would you rather hit the # key or the % key). Most of the unique capabilities orgmode offers (e.g. programming language syntax highlighting) are functionally covered by popular markdown extensions available everywhere someone interacting with markdown would work (e.g. Github, Obsidian).
This is a religious war, not engineering. Use what works for you.
This isn't a "religious war", because similarities of Markdown and Org-mode are only superficial, once you learn more about the differences, you will see what actually makes Org-mode much, much different.
- Org's outline is semantic - the nesting IS the data structure. You can collapse/expand, refile, navigate as a tree natively. Markdown treats `#` markers as decoration on top of flat text.
- Org drawers, properties, timestamps are integrated. Markdown frontmatter is bolted on.
- Org has in-buffer table editing. Markdown tables are write-once text blobs.
- Org can execute code blocks and weave results back into the document. Markdown extensions can display code, but they don't integrate execution.
- Org can track what links to what, rename headings and update links automatically.
Your claim of the "20% stylistic" is just wrong - those feature differences aren't cosmetic - they do change how you use the tool for knowledge work.
> If orgmode had the popularity that markdown had, it would also have twenty variants
Org-mode does have fragmentation - it's just vertical (depth of features) rather than horizontal (incompatible variants) - Org-Roam, Howm, Denote, et al.
Org-mode is less "one format" and more "a Lisp-cursed toolkit where everyone assembles their own variant through configuration" The Markdown variants are at least standardized incompatibility - you kinda know what GFM does. With Org, you don't really know what someone's personal setup supports until you try it.
If Org-mode had GitHub's reach and people were pushing personal variants of the spec onto the web, you'd absolutely see 20+ "Org-flavored Markdown" projects. The consistency is partly an accident of Org being the domain of power users who configure rather than fork.
There's no "causative reason" for why markdown is more popular than Org - the entire argument is just nonsense. Nobody in the right mind (with the proper Org-mode experience) would ever argue "which is better". It's like arguing LaTeX vs. Word - LaTeX is clearly technically superior for certain tasks, even though Word won institutional dominance - but only those who have very little exposure to LaTeX would argue that "Word's popularity proves it's better designed...", or something.
What if I told you that your analogy breaks completely if you actually consider what Org-mode is. Think of Markdown as a noun (a thing) and Org-mode as a verb (a system that does things). It's like comparing HTML and React components - it's not about "preferable side of the road to drive", we're talking about a complete different mode of transportation - i.e., in a nation where there's infrastructure and roads for cyclists - the rules change from "drive on one side and obey traffic signs..." to be something different. Similar, yet different.
That's what everyone's missing when they try to compare Markdown and Org-mode, while looking at it only through the angle of the markup structure. Markdown is a markup - pure structure, no logic, no state, no content with behavior, no executable source blocks, no embedded logic - and that's the point.
Arguing which one should be "the default choice", is like saying - "just always drive a car, cars are more popular..." - an argument that has no sense whatsoever. If people find Org-mode useful (because it is), well, there's really not much you can do about it, right? Just like you can't tell people to prefer a bike, car, moto or a boat - each has pros and cons and suits different scenarios.
I think you're wildly confused about both of these thing. Your objection assumes standards are about serialization format (how to write things down). But org-mode isn't primarily competing on that. It's competing on semantics - what the structure means to the system.
Markdown solves a problem of presentation - how to write text that converts to HTML or PDF. It's intentionally minimal because its job is: "make readable text that also renders nicely". Org-mode solves a problem of computation and workflow. It's a syntax for meaning - how to encode structure that a program can act on.
Markdown doesn't have task states, Markdown doesn't execute code, Markdown doesn't have metadata.
You could theoretically write org content in markdown syntax, but then you'd lose:
- Task state tracking
- Code execution
- Agenda queries
- Time-based organization
- Dynamic folding based on TODO status, and many more things
These aren't "nice-to-haves" - they're the point. Org-mode exists because markdown deliberately chose not to have these. They're orthogonal solutions.
When you say "we don't need another competing standard", the real issue is intermediate layers - CommonMark, MultiMarkdown, Pandoc's extended markdown, GitHub Flavored Markdown - these perhaps are redundant and fragmenting. But org-mode isn't trying to be a markdown variant. It's trying to be an execution environment that happens to be text-based.
Is it though? Like for example, I often deal with Org-mode documents of several thousand lines of text and I honestly don't know any piece of software that can acceptably handle multi-thousand lines of markdown.
Emacs/Org-mode has tons of different ways to navigate and search through these large bodies - the outline nature of the structure is perfect for that - there's narrowing, collapsing/expanding, sparse-tree search, flexible sorting, indirect buffers, imenu, overlays and text properties that can render the text conditionally, etc.
I read HN and Reddit threads in Org-mode format¹; I browse my Jira board and tickets in Org-mode², I have Wiktionary lookup³ and Thesaurus⁴ - all in Org-mode.
Comparing Org-mode and Markdown and saying "Markdown is widely used [and thus it's better]" is wildly immature - popularity doesn't determine fitness for purpose - PHP is more widely used than Rust or Zig, but that doesn't make it "better" for systems programming.
I can agree, Markdown is adequate for relatively small documents like README files, but it's nowhere close to even try to compete with Org-mode in so many different aspects far beyond just the markdown format structure.
That’s awesome. Clearly, you are an Org format rockstar.
But be that as it may, if Markdown is inadequate for a variety of tasks, why do people use it for a variety of tasks? Your rebuttal is just “Here’s a task or two that I do that I think Org format is better for.” Fine. I don’t have an opinion about your tasks. I believe you that Org is better for those for you. But neither do those cases rebut the fact that MANY MORE people use Markdown quite successfully on a daily basis than Org for a wide variety of tasks (blogging, documentation, personal information management, etc.). Can Org also do those things? Yes, surely. Can Org do more than those things? Surely. But so can Markdown. So, if you want to say “Org format is better for ME and I can do more with it because it’s more feature full,” then I’d reply, “I’m sure you’re right.” But if you’re saying “Org is better for everyone,” well, then, the data just doesn’t support that.
And for the record I did not say that “Markdown is better.” You are putting words in my mouth. I said it was adequate for a wide variety of tasks. It works. It is sufficient. My proof for that is that it’s widely used for a variety of tasks. That’s it. Q.E.D.
> Can Org do more than those things? Surely. But so can Markdown.
It just cannot, because THAT'S THE POINT - it is by design. You guys with little or no exposure to Org-mode keep arguing that Markdown somehow can be replacement or be a "better" version of Org-mode. Well, IT CANNOT. Period!
That is because they have different design goals, different applications and different use-cases. I would love to use Markdown if it was clearly sufficient for the things I do - well, it is not! Do I then curse and abandon Markdown? No, of course - I would not. It still useful for certain tasks. Just because it's used for a variety of tasks, it doesn't mean it can replace Org-mode anytime soon. Just like MS Word format can't and never would replace LaTeX or PDF.
Over time, you may discover one of the biggest truth about computing - the immense (and sadly disregarded) value of plain text¹. Code is nothing but structured text. The cardinal job of a programmer is text manipulation.
I'm reading this thread in my editor. Why? Because I'm dealing with text - browsers are great for presentation of text, not so nice for manipulating it. What kind of manipulations? Well, I can find, sort, group, narrow, collapse/expand, translate, extract summaries for paragraphs, find all the URLs (including matching a pattern), etc. Good luck doing all that in the browser - even with the extensions.
Most developers don't even get annoyed by seemingly small things. Like how often do you need to bring the url of a given browser tab into your editor? Simplest thing, yet do it dozens of times a day and it gets vexing. For me - it takes milliseconds and a keypress - it even extracts the URL description and converts the link to markdown (if needed).
Or another example - whenever someone's screen sharing, or I'm watching a video and they show a piece of text (let's just for consistency say a url). How would you normally extract it? e.g, for your notes. For me - it takes selecting a region of screen and a keypress - my editor calls a CLI OCRing tool and voila. I don't really care that the source isn't "technically speaking" text - if I can read it, then computer for sure can "read" it too, am I right? That's text manipulation.
There may be dozens (if not hundreds) of such examples (including coding-related) in my workflow that work on top of the idea of manipulating plain text.
Once you grok the cerebral virtue of the idea of having complete and total control over text, you may find that modal editors - nvim/emacs/etc. - are the best instruments to achieve that control.
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¹https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html
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