A real maximize button for Mac
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
- Install the SIMBL bundle
- Unzip the Stoptlight file, and move the StoplightHack.bundle file to
[home]/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/plugins - Double-click the Stoplight preference pane to install it, and in Preferences/Stoplight, set “Default Behaviors->Zoom” to “Fill Screen”
- Copy the Maximize.scpt to
[home]/Library/Scripts - In the Universal Access preferences pane, enable “Enable access for Assistive Devices”
- Run Quicksilver, and open the preferences pane – under the “Triggers” panel add a trigger to run the Maximize script (I use Cmd-Ctrl-M)
Thanks for the tip on real maximizing. I just bought a macbook pro this week, and I’m trying to make it friendly to my pc habits. I think I followed your directions, but I’m only able to use the hotkey in some applications (e.g., firefox) and not others (MS Office for Mac apps like Word). Any guesses as to whether I took a misstep during setup or if there are other interferring factors? Any help is appreciated! Again, I appreciate the help for mac and hacking novice.
Nick
Nick
6 Nov 07 at 1:27 am
I believe Stoplight only works with Cocoa apps like Firefox and not Carbon apps like the Finder and, in your case, Microsoft Office. There doesn’t seem to be any cure-all solution to the Zoom issue yet…
KJA
10 Nov 07 at 3:38 am
[...] wrote about this before in a previous article, but this method has problems with Leopard and QuickSilver; its mechanism uses some [...]
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24 May 08 at 3:08 pm
I think this program has compatibility issues with Leopard. All of the Microsoft Office apps would crash when I tried to print or save as PDF. Uninstalling Stoplight as described in the original instruction file cured the problem. I really hate the default behavior of Mac OS and hope somebody will update Stoplight. (Hint: the source code is available).
mac
11 Jul 09 at 6:40 pm
some possible alternatives: Megazoomer & Right Zoom
cam
11 Jul 09 at 6:45 pm
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