What is the one tiny macOS annoyance you would pay to make disappear forever?
I've been thinking about how many great Mac apps start from incredibly small frustrations. Not "I need a new productivity system" problems, but things like: Why does macOS forget this setting? Why is there no native way to do this? Why…
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“I've been thinking about how many great Mac apps start from incredibly small frustrations.
Not "I need a new productivity system" problems, but things like:
Why does macOS forget this setting?
Why is there no native way to do this?
Why…”I've been thinking about how many great Mac apps start from incredibly small frustrations.
Not "I need a new productivity system" problems, but things like:
Why does macOS forget this setting?
Why is there no native way to do this?
Why does this menu/task/window behave like this?
Some of the best utilities I've discovered came from random recommendations solving very specific annoyances.
What's your personal "I can't believe macOS doesn't do this yet" problem?
Maybe someone here will build the next great Mac utility from the answers.
PS: it's amazing we have so many builders here who built a product to solve their pain points!
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Home and End keys don’t work. 20 years after leaving Windows still annoying AF. Karabiner, macOS settings etc still leave edge cases in certain applications.
I hate when I'm working on something and my focus gets yanked to another window I have to deal with immediately. Confirmation dialogs are the worst offenders. My active window should never lose focus without my say-so. Also, whatever happened to alerts sliding down from the title bar of the window they belong to? Sheets stayed attached to their parent window, so there was zero ambiguity about which window an alert related to, and they never stole focus from anything else. Mac OS X 10.0 nailed this, and I have no idea why Apple moved away from it. Attaching a screenshot as an example.
That still exists in some sense. Alerts are modal to their parent window and sheets still exist, even though they don't slide down from the top of the window anymore. But both (alerts and sheets) will grey out the parent window to indicate modality.
it’s the whole pile of tiny things: no native per-app volume control, uninstalling apps still leaves files everywhere, Finder remains inconsistent, the file picker feels ancient, managing windows and Spaces is still awkward, Command-Tab switches apps instead of windows, notifications are clumsy, external displays and audio devices randomly forget themselves and AirDrop works only when it feels like it. None of these ruins macOS, but together they create a surprising amount of daily friction.
Multi-display is fucking annoying. Pinning apps to a space only seems to work 100% of the time when you have a single display - but when you have multiple displays then you can only seem to pin apps to a certain display?! Please someone tell me I'm wrong and I'm just missing how to actually do it. It's a massive gripe of mine. Spaces are not fully distinct - docks are shared across spaces, and when you have a few different spaces open then all those app icons collect in the dock and clutter it to fuck (and also in the cmd-tab app switcher). Coming from Windows this infuriates me - I know it's just a difference in design philosophy, but if I'm on a certain space, why would I want to see apps from other spaces - I'll switch to that space if I want to use those apps. Media keys (pause, next track, previous track) just seem to assign themselves to random apps that have media, instead of always controlling the in focus app/window. I literally never know what the media apps are going to control unless I only have one app that has media.
Not Mac OS but Photoshop is appalling for this.
Too many separate macapps for single functions taking up menubar space, even with a menubar manager.
Yes this is my annoyance too. My menu bar is a pile of shit now.
I want a way to allow click-through across the entire OS. Currently on MacOS, when you have window A focused and click window B, your first click focuses B, and your second click on B actually does something inside it. But this isn't consistent-- if B is a web browser, your first click takes effect. This inconsistency where sometimes you need to click twice, sometimes once, annoys the heck out of me. Windows and Linux have click-through on every window, and I would like this on MacOS also. I've looked into this extensively and there is simply no technical way to do it. Apple would need to relent.
By far the biggest one for me is not having a path bar in Finder that you can type in like in Windows and several popular file explorers across several linux DEs. I don't have the hatred for Finder that a lot of people do, and I think there are plenty of ways it's better than Explorer.exe, but man the lack of an editable path bar drives me craaaaaaaaaazy. I know you can use cmd+G and such, but it's just not the same :( OH, and not having "Snap to grid" on by default everywhere. Who in the absolute fuck doesn't want to snap to grid????????????????