Maximize on Macs sucks

I’ve found a solution for the #1 annoyance of mine on Mac – the lack of a real maximize. The “Zoom” concept is incredibly irritating to me, there’s no keyboard shortcut for it, and it sometimes makes the window smaller. I realize the concept is “Set window size to the size of the contents”, but in practice “Make window as big as possible” is so much more useful.

Update: SIMBL may mess with your QuickSilver install – if you find that QS starts and immediately quits, let me know and I’ll tell you how to delete SIMBL

The solution is pretty hacky, but the results work pretty well. You need a few different things to make this work, and the steps are a little involved. I tested this on an Intel Macbook Pro on Leopard, but it should work on any architecture.

What you’ll need

• SIMBL 0.8.2 (Download from here)
• Stoplight 1.1 by Andy Matsuchak (download from here)
• Quicksilver (Download from here)
• Maximize script from Mac OS X Hints (Download from here)

How to

1. Install the SIMBL bundle
2. Unzip the Stoptlight file, and move the StoplightHack.bundle file to [home]/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/plugins
3. Double-click the Stoplight preference pane to install it, and in Preferences/Stoplight, set “Default Behaviors->Zoom” to “Fill Screen”
4. Copy the Maximize.scpt to [home]/Library/Scripts
5. In the Universal Access preferences pane, enable “Enable access for Assistive Devices”
6. Run Quicksilver, and open the preferences pane – under the “Triggers” panel add a trigger to run the Maximize script (I use Cmd-Ctrl-M)