> you can't have a client that has [...] better information density on the screen
A far-from-ideal means of making the client more dense is to zoom with ctrl-{-,=,0}. It's exposed as an settings option too. Rather annoyingly however it doesn't seem to reduce the minimum frame width.
As someone who uses fullscreen magnification, all the excessive negative space that is trendy in a lot of contemporary UX design (e.g., in Microsoft Teams) is difficult to deal with. The more space there is between everything, the harder it is to tell 'where I am' when I'm zoomed in. Higher information density is easier to navigate spatially when your visual window of context is smaller, whether that's because you're using full screen magnification or because you're physically moving closer to your monitor and concentrating.
Similarly, the more screen space is wasted on negative space in windows whose main function is to present something to me (PDF viewer, shared screen or PowerPoint window during a video call), the more I have to rely on external magnification software instead of in-app zooming or scaling, which makes everything blurry (pixelated) and ugly.
> In all my years of working with text editors, I don't think I've ever found myself thinking "This viewport is too small. I wish I could quickly resize it to just the width of the text, and maybe the height of the screen, or maybe something else, depending on what I'm doing." When my window is too narrow or whatever, I usually just (a) maximize it (which you can't to on osx)
I use Sublime Text 2 on OS X. When I click on the zoom button, it maximises the editor window to the entire width and height of the screen.
It's amazing how bad Windows still is at this. In my experience, connecting monitors of different densities results in crazy things breaking, like the "maximize window" feature.
> Sharing a single window makes Teams minimize the window with everyones video camera on it into a small window in the corner of your primary screen. I have a 49" wide screen, I can have that Teams window open (so I can see faces/people) and share a window at full-size for everyone else, STOP minimizing that window.
Took me a while to figure this out, but, and if I understand what's going on and you didn't realize it you're going to smack yourself, but...
Try clicking on that tiny window with everyone's video feed on it. It gets bigger again into a full (and resizable) window with everyone's video feed, while the window you are sharing is still being shared (and outlined in red).
Apologies if I misunderstand or this doens't apply to you (I'm on MacOS), but it literally took me months of being frustrated with that situation before I realized clicking on the tiny window would restore it to a full window, so I figured that might be you too. I forget, maybe it requires a double-click.
> current biggest grip with dt... why are those damn arrows at the edges of the screen so tiny??? Expanding and retracting the side panels requires pixel-perfect accuracy on a ~20px target. I know I could use keyboard shortcuts, but my brain isn't wired for them yet.
> I'll either have to invoke horizontal scrolling or I'll have a bunch of wasted space if you are using different size tabs from me.
So change your tab size? That's true if you have a different sized monitor, no matter what the tab size. That's... kind of the point of using tabs.
>I've come to the conclusion that the only sensible tab width is 8, since that works everywhere including in tools where it isn't practical to set (eg. less).
Pass -x[size] to less or put it in the LESS environment variable to make it default. You can also type it in while less is running.
Also, what do you mean "works"? The world doesn't explode if you view a file with a different tab size than it was created with. Again, kind of the point...
> Compare it to Linux UIs where you often have to grab a single pixel border on a 4k monitor to resize a window.
On Linux you hold the super/windows key and click/drag anywhere on the window to move it, or right-click/drag anywhere on the window to resize it. It's much easier than using thick borders. Discoverability is admittedly not great, but this feature easily coexists with window borders. Microsoft could keep the thick borders by default and also implement this.
> Funnily enough, on Windows their new Terminal supports it also if you dig in the settings a bit.
Can you permanently resize it? Last I tried it, it was slow and I didn't see how to make it fullscreen or behave predictably on multimonitor setups, so I couldn't actually use it.
> I've been hit by your first point as well (not often, but often enough since I switch between resolutions frequently), and if you press the maximize button it will often (not always though) "raise" the lower portion up above the dock enough so you can resize. Not the most intuitive, but it works.
I'm not arguing with you here, just adding a data point about how unintuitive it is.
I certainly agree that you can do this—but, to my mind, you're then re-sizing the window in its maximised state; and, if you click again to ‘un-maximise’ it, then it'll be right back to the inaccessible position that it had before. I don't know if this is any sort of serious objection, in the sense that it can actually cause trouble, but it nags at my mind when I use it: “You don't really want that window maximised! Go back to its rest state!” I therefore usually wind up with the solution of “Find a big enough monitor and re-size there.”
(By the way, I love Mac OS, but definitely hate this behaviour.)
> I'd really prefer it to adopt the resolution of the client machine
We have this implemented, but the problem is that the current version of Xvfb doesn't support randr extension. See https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26391 . With the patch attached to that bug CRD should resize desktop automatically.
> the green button originally did something like resize the window to an optimal size (IIRC)
Indeed, it's called "zoom". Fabulous when it works correctly, and one of my favorite features. You can still get at it with Option-Click (on the green), when the application supports it (not all do). Double-click on titlebar might also work, but I can't really check atm.
> visually complicated app to ever be fully resizable in all dimensions without any flicker
This is still ridiculously hard to do on Windows if using standard controls as a filler. Especially when resizing by the top or left edge. The only trick I know is to attach D3D context to the window, but even that has edge cases that look even more jarring than regular flickering.
> In windowed mode, I can either have scrollbars to view a subsection, or I can scale the window. Doing the right thing, changing the size of the remote desktop when the local window is resized, isn't an option because that is set at connection time.
Side note: if the server is running Windows 8.1 or later (or the equivalent server versions, Server 2012 R2 or later), this isn't the case any more-- RDP sessions can be resized freely at any time.
Naturally, the built-in RDP client that comes with Windows doesn't support this (because, of course, why would it?), but the UWP Remote Desktop app in the Windows Store does (as does the current Mac client).
>Want to manually scale your display to an exact resolution? Go to Displays, Hold down the option key and then click on the text next to a radio button. WTF!!! Who designed this, this is completely non nondiscoverable.
I agree with the UI discoverability point, but it is called out in the documentation.
A far-from-ideal means of making the client more dense is to zoom with ctrl-{-,=,0}. It's exposed as an settings option too. Rather annoyingly however it doesn't seem to reduce the minimum frame width.
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