Filed under: OS, Software, TUAW Tips, Mac 101
TUAW Tip: Option-clicking the green button
For many applications, simply option-clicking the green button will "maximize" all the open windows of that application. Of course, maximize behaves differently in some applications. For example, option-clicking the green button in Safari makes all the open pages taller, but not wider. That's by design in Safari, and I rather like it. If you come from Windows, however, you'll be mortified that the window does not occupy the entire screen. In Firefox, it does indeed maximize to fill the screen. It's a matter of preference, but the key point: option-click will max all open windows of that application. Some are "smarter" than others.
As our last trick, try option-clicking the green button Calculator. It toggles between the expanded, scientific calculator to the programmer's calculator to regular calculator. Neat!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Darren said 3:10PM on 9-18-2009
Sorry TUAW, you're kind of wrong.
First, it's the "Zoom" button, not the "Maximize" button, and it's (usually) equivalent to the Window > Zoom command.
If you want to see what the option key does, open the Window menu then press the Option key, and you'll usually see the "Zoom" command change to "Zoom All". That's equivalent to option-clicking the Zoom button.
The Calculator's Zoom button is one of those rare exceptions: it toggles between calculator modes regardless of whether you're holding down the Option key.
If you want to find hidden commands, open a window and press the Option, Control, and Shift keys, and the hidden commands will appear. It works in most menus.
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Victor Agreda Jr said 3:16PM on 9-18-2009
Ah yes, the Zoom button. Good tips, thanks!
Blanka said 5:59AM on 9-19-2009
It works in Tiger Calculator as well like that.
MacMarine said 3:13PM on 9-18-2009
You do not need to option-click the green button on the calculator to switch modes. Just clicking on it will suffice.
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Hobbes said 3:16PM on 9-18-2009
Like MacMarine said, you don't need to option-click anything. Just clicking does the trick in most applications, not just the Calculator.
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gregj said 3:53PM on 9-18-2009
well, safari doesn't change its behavior, when pressed on green thingie with option. At least not on SL !. And personally, I hate that !
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Kevin Sutherland said 4:14PM on 9-18-2009
Someone needs to explain to me the value of not having any option to have Safari use maximal use of your screen width. I would never stop using Firefox for sake of all the add-ons I enjoy, but I certainly could not start using Safari because of this. Every web page seems to prefer a different width. Why would I want to have to click a button to resize the browser every time I go to another page?
When I first switched to OSX (when Leopard came out), Firefox's behavior was to maximize to the full screen size except for the width of the first row of icons on the desktop. I never understood this either, but at least it got me closer to full screen and I could just drag the window over in one motion and have it full screen. I was glad that in 3.0 they started allowing it to maximize to the full screen size.
Apple has this incredibly polished OS with every aspect designed for optimal usability, and yet Safari just acts with the strangest behavior in this regard. I thought for sure they would fix this in 4.0, but they didn't.
LaughingMan said 6:15PM on 9-18-2009
Holding down the option button and clicking the zoom button in Safari zooms all windows, including ones in the background. Just clicking on the zoom button only applies the zoom to the frontmost window.
Kevin. I would not consider this a "bug" in Safari that needs to be fixed in the next version because it is consistent with Mac OS user interface guidelines
The Mac is different than Windows. Going back way before Mac OS X, the idea in Mac OS is that windows should be allowed to overlap spatially so that the user can know that there are other windows in the background, and to facilitate drag and drop.
If you have a fully maximized window, there is no way to drag and drop to the desktop or to another window you have open but is obscured (actually, that's not totally true, since another UI feature Apple has introduced in recent years, Exposé, allows drag and drop to spaces, windows and the desktop even if your frontmost window is obscured, if you know how to activate it).
Derick said 2:18AM on 9-20-2009
@ Kevin
TUAW had a spot for an application called Size-Up a couple months back that I think will solve your problem. Once you turn it on you have a ton of options using the modifier keys. if I press ctrl+option+command+M Size-Up will attempt to maximize any window into any display. You can also make it throw a window into the corners at 1/4 the size of your screen or shove it to the left/right, top/bottom at half. Look it up if you're interested. I really like the functions it has.
Zachary Tirrell said 3:57PM on 9-18-2009
I was really excited about this tip... but... it's just plain wrong. The option key does NOTHING in calculator.
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Yoshi1080 said 4:04PM on 9-18-2009
BTW is there a way to get Firefox to zoom windows instead of fully maximizing them? It worked in Firefox 2, but since Firefox 3 it's broken.
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Yahtzee said 4:33PM on 9-18-2009
Word 2008 freaks out with this. Start with two documents open, then Option-click the green button. I think it perpetually switches between the two open documents, requiring a Force-quit.
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jollyllama said 5:37PM on 9-18-2009
@Kevin
I can't explain the value of not giving you the option of full zoom (options are good!) but I'll take a stab at why I think it's not there.
I think you'll find that this is mostly an issue of Windows vs Mac computing habits. I almost never hear this request from longtime mac users, but almost all Windows users want it.
Think about the difference between Mac and Windows in terms of the placement of the menu bar. This is a fundamental difference between the two OS's, and cause for massive confusion, particularly in moving from Windows to Mac. In the Windows side, each new window feels like a separate instance of the program - each one is the full program complete with menus. On the Mac side, however, each window is simply a function of the larger program, which contains multiple windows all under a unified menu bar. I'm not saying this is how the code works, just how the UI metaphor works.
This relates to your question because in the Mac metaphor, I would never want to cover up my whole screen with a single window, because I assume that there could be other windows from the same program behind it. I'm constantly clicking through to background windows both in the same program and other programs, and to me covering up my whole view would be wasteful. On the Windows metaphor, however, a window is treated as a full entity, containing everything you'd need at least within the same program. Covering up everything else seems logical in that world.
Again, I'm not saying one is better, I'm just trying to explain my interpretation of why you almost never hear mac users calling for a full screen zoom feature, but almost every Windows switcher would like it.
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Taylor Hicks said 5:38PM on 9-18-2009
This comment/bug is better than the actual (and inaccurate) article. Nice work!
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Phippster said 6:11PM on 9-18-2009
I think the change in behavior to iTunes 9 is awful. Very inconvenient! I used the green button all the time to swap to the miniplayer and now it's useless.
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chrism238 said 6:17PM on 9-18-2009
I thought that one of the strengths of Apple's interface was its consistency. This wildly variable behaviour across different *Apple* applications has me questioning that consistency...
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Rainer Brockerhoff said 7:43PM on 9-18-2009
My Klicko utility (http://www.brockerhoff.net/klicko) has an option to make the green button maximize the window.
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Smivey said 7:43PM on 9-18-2009
I didn't even know there was still a calculator app outside of Dashboard.
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SIP said 8:40PM on 9-18-2009
This Option+Zoom function has existed since System 7 (there were two buttons top-right [zoom & collapse] & one top-left [close]).
This functionality remained the same until 10.5, where if you had multiple windows of varying sizes open, you could resize them all in one go by Option+Zooming the topmost window.
10.6 doesn’t seem to behave in the same way.
Option+Close (red button) will close all windows, Finder and within apps.
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John.B said 9:40PM on 9-18-2009
I've said this before, but option-Zoom is supposed to resize a window to fit the current screen. Useful on my MacBook if I've last used a program on an external monitor, because the only way to resize the window is by dragging the bottom-right corner and a window that's too large for the screen prevents you from doing this.
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