I love not having window borders waste screen estate, and solve the grabbing issue by having the windows key + left mouse button bound to moving windows and windows key + right mouse button to resize. I can "grab" the window anywhere, with no need to hit borders or a title bar (which I also don't have...)
Things being "a waste of screen real estate" was a bigger issue when we only had 1024x768.
Now we have extremely high resolution monitors, and we use that to get really smooth angled lines and anti-aliasing, scaling up the visuals and decreasing the logical DPI, but the lack of a hard edge to grab doesn't get wider when the visuals are scaled up: it's still a single pixel wide.
The 4x3 aspect monitors were bigger. The 16x9 added only horizontal space.
We still need the same "real" size of items in the real world. And there is a trend to occupy the space with useless staff: ribbon, big G logo, status messages not about what you do but about bugs and internal program stucture.
> The 4x3 aspect monitors were bigger. The 16x9 added only horizontal space.
Unless you had a large monitor back then and a small monitor now, this is incredibly incorrect.
Back in the 1024x768 days, most people probably had a 15" monitor. You might have had 17" if you were lucky. Even at 17", that monitor is only 13.6 x 10.2"
Now, People on a 16:9 are likely running a minimum 22". At 16:9, that's 19.2 x 10.8".
...shit you might be right. But really only if you had a large 4:3 monitor and now have a small 16:9 monitor. 4:3 15" is 12 x 9", and 16:9 24" is 20.9 x 11.8. 27" is 23.5 x 13.2.
Laptop screens are of course a different beast. Still though, with resolutions being higher, certainly they could have used a pixel or two to create an actual window edge.
It's pretty much as big an issue now, because my field of view has not gotten any bigger.
And I think you missed the essential part of my comment: The reason it's a waste of screen real estate for me is that there is no need for any edge to grab when I can grab the window anywhere by combining with a keypress.
I have more real estate to "grab" than you can ever get with borders that way, without dedicating any space to it at all.
Modern design looooves wasting screen real estate on white space. Partially to look "clean" and partially as a result of avoiding any hint of skeuomorphism. Have to separate different UI elements somehow.
Trying to claw some of it back from window borders seems like it's attacking the wrong problem.
I hardly have any UI elements to begin with, it's almost all text. But that's also largely besides the point, which was more that window borders only matters beyond visual separation in the first place because of a UI paradigm that wants you to hunt for a specific place on the edge of the window in order to move or resize it, but it doesn't need to be like that at all.
The point is not to deny your preferences, but rather that they shouldn't be forced upon everyone else, especially when they break decades of proven usability design and practice.
My point is that the "proven" usability design and practice isn't all that proven.
There is a whole lot of unexplored or underexplored design space, and when people are complaining about having space to grab a window border away from them due to a tension between competing needs it's worth considering that there are alternatives where that tension just goes away:
You only need wider window borders because you've already decided that you need to grab the border, rather than decided you just want an efficient way of moving or resizing the window. Maybe that genuinely is the only option that works for you, but most people haven't tried alternatives.
I'll note that lots of user interfaces has this kind of modal mechanism to indicate which class of action you want to take on an object so you don't need to target some tiny visual area, which is always going to be too small for some people nearly no matter how big you make it. We're used to doing that. Most people just don't do it with windows.
Even if we were going to dumb computers down to that level - and really there are tons of things in any modern UI that is entirely undiscoverable - that is something trivially solvable by popping up a tooltip explaining the options the first few times a user grabs the border.
No, based on their keybindings it sounds like they use dwm, a window manager which you have to compile yourself, configure yourself in a .c source file, and comes without window decorations by default, I believe. It's neat but made for 0.1% of computer users at most.
Although I want to add the "Windows Key + Left/Right Mouse Button" bindings are incredibly convenient and should be supported by every OS by default imho. The area you have to hit with the mouse cursor to resize a window turns from "a few pixels in the window corner" to "the entire damn window no matter if there's a button or not".
I use bspwm, which is still not easy for beginners though not as extreme as dwm, but it's also kinda besides the point which is that a lot of the complaints about borders really are complaints about the difficulty of moving and resizing windows or otherwise manipulating rhem, and once you look at it from that point of view there are alternative solutions, one of which is this one.
Pretty sure you can configure any WM to use those key combinations. I used them in i3 and currently use them in bspwm. Not sure why you jumped to dwm immediately.
I'm sure you can also use them in a fully fledged DE, and someone mentioned using alt + click on windows to drag.
