How many of you prefer full screen for your applications? What are the advantages and disadvantages of doing this?
Edit: I run all my applications full screen, that includes shell, browser, app etc. In this way, I feel less distraction and concentrate on what I am doing.
Since I got a 22" monitor at 1650x1050, it's quite rare that I maximise windows now. Whereas working at 1280x1024, I pretty much always have my browser / text editor at full screen.
A really good tool I've found (on Jeff's recommendation) for managing your windows on large screen resolutions is Winsplit Revolution.
Advantage: being less distracted by other "hello I'm doing something" applications.
Disadvantage: same as advantage ;-)
More serioulsy, it really depends of which application.
Yes (for voting)
I'm on a mac, so too many windows can get crazy. Keeping several things in one window keeps things nice and organized. :)
One of the things I miss most about switching to Mac is the ability to make your apps go full screen. Most of the time you click the green + on the window it fills up vertically but not horizontally. Then there's the dock - you can hide it but it provides useful information that I would rather have remain visible.
Back when I used Linux and Windows I had nearly all applications full-screen - my editor, my browser, my email - it made it very easy to context switch between things that I was working on. I rarely needed to see two windows at once, and it was never a problem to do so. I think that this is probably one of the largest deficiencies in Mac OS X.
Generally yes, I do prefer full screen. It limits distractions from other applications I have going at the moment. It helps me focus on what I'm doing.
The only time I have more than window on the screen, for an extended period of time, is when I'm actively copying from or looking off of the other window.
However, my habits my change when I eventually get a bigger, maybe wide screen, monitor.
At lest for the time being, I'll get my money's worth out of my ALT and TAB keys!
I use fullscreen on my desktop, with it's crummy 1280x1024 LCD. My laptop is 1400x1050, and that's big enough that I don't feel the need to maximize anymore. Not much of a difference between 1280x1024 and 1400x1050, but it's enough.
When I was on Windows I did, but since switching to Mac OS I've stopped doing so. With limited screen real-estate (I use a single not-too-large monitor) it doesn't feel right to have applications taking up superfluous space. My web browser and text editors need only be as large as the content they're displaying, which is very rarely my entire screen.
Fullscreen many times on the laptop, but not always. Also, I find that things like terminals I prefer to have maximized vertically, but I like to have multiple columns. At work I usually have three terminals, one full height where I'm editing, moving about, one at normal size with the tail -f of my log and one that I have handy for man pages or whatever. If I have multiple monitors then probably not. Usually I have a code window open and a browser for testing/reference.
It depends. In general, my browser is in fullscreen at 1024x768 , even though it sometimes will be windowed in order to be able to see other things, for example, when comparing something on a website with something in an editor.
Editors on the other hand are generally as high as possible, but only 80 characters wide, because any more width wll be wasted, as no good good is longer than 80 characters. Furthermore, I can usually keep 2 editors next to each other to be able to keep my eye in the datastructure while building a visitor for it or something like this.
Shells are generally the default size (a bit more than one quarter of the screen), however, they might be shrunk to fit more consoles on the screen during a certain logfile-digging session. Having like 5 consoles in a pattern so you can read the significant parts of all the shells at once is very helpful. :)
For games and videos, I generally prefer fullscreen, because I seek a certain level of immersion and the windows / linux interface is just preventing this.
I generally like fullscreen, yes. Exceptions are when fullscreen leeds to overwide text -- I have a 22" widescreen, so I really don't want text to span the entire screenwidth. This happens with badly written webpages that just fill the entire window-width with text, or in shell windows (putty on windows).
Personally, I really don't understand the need to do anything on fullscreen that doesn't require the screen real estate offered by the entire display (like certain games). Full screen applications just make window/application switching nigh impossible because you can never really see what window or application you are switching to. And fullscreen takes 90% of the usefulness out of drag 'n drop.
I can't believe why would anybody use a fullscreen window (isn't that a contradiction?), apart from a presentation or watching a movie, of course.
In the old days, i had a Classic Mac, with the tiny 9 inch monitor (512x384 1-bit pixels!). It was like looking at the interior through a hole in the wall; but good program layout, together with great design of each element, made it quite usable with several windows around, all of them with some corner still visible. 'Muscle memory' at its best. Lots of small details helped a lot, like how each directory stored the size/position of its window, so it really mattered when you took a couple of seconds to put each window in the best place.
Also, there wasn't a "maximize" button, there was a "zoom" button, which wasn't supposed to expand to fullscreen; it expanded to "the nearest possible to the ideal size". On most document windows that meant full height, and page-size width; but directories with few file on it actually shrink to a neat box without scrollbars. That encouraged good file hierarchies, with a well-defined use for each directory.
Windows programs never got that right, at first they were all designed with single-use in mind, so the 'maximize' button made sense. After GUIs took over, i think it was lazy developers that didn't take the time to create good, well designed, interfaces so they fill so much of the screen with seldom-used icons and tools, that users need all the space they can get just to work on a single thing.
That negates all benefits of windowing. The user is almost never multitasking, just switches from one full screen app to another.
The worst case is also too common: web designers that assume that since it's ridiculous to use a screen less than 800x600, then it's a waste of screen to require less than 800 pixels across. but i want to see other things!
any window that covers more than a third of my screen is an eyesore to me.
any webpage that requires more than half of my screen width will be closed ASAP.
I use full screen with split windows for multiple editors Also I think there is an equal productivity gain with one large monitor or two 19 inch or similar size monitor. In the dual monitor set up I usually run the app full screen to that window.
the monitor management in OS X seems pretty good. On vista I was using Winsplitrevolution......
For browsers, IDEs, word processors etc. more full-blown apps I always use full screen. I feel easier to concentrate and also the extra space is helpful. I don't find myself needing to look at multiple windows a lot. A common case where I multitask is IDEs/Web Browser/Db browser but at work I have two monitors. On my laptop/home desktop (just 17") I often listen to music when browsing and I don't need to look at the music player. I do use chat programs but it's easier to know when someone says something with the blink, rather than seeing text appear in that window.
For shells I always just use the default size and enlarge as needed. I tend to only need it for a few moments, or I might need to open several of them, so rarely full screen.
I almost always use full screen for all of my applications, especially if I'm using an application like an IDE. I recently switched to the xmonad window manager, and in my configuration I have made full-screen the default. It is a tiling window manger, so I can just hit a hotkey (Windows + Space, in my case) to change the layout style to tiling and my other windows on that desktop are tiled along with my currently active window. This is handy for when I need to refer to a webpage or something while using my editor or the shell.
It helps to have a window manager that automates this for me and I don't have to think about it.