Mac · Reviewed

Window resizing is so hard it seems broken

Raised by 79 people over 19 years (2008–2026), in 19 of them.

What people report

2009-07
The default Mac interface in particular I find difficult, as there's just one tiny resize tab in one corner.
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2021-02
for years you couldn't resize a window from the left edge and everybody was "fine" with it
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2026-01
there is no obvious zone within which the resizing cursor should take effect. There is no visual target for the user.
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2026-01
It's extremely unintuitive and I constantly find myself missing the resize zone.
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2026-07
trying to resize a window makes it feel like life will be at 80 years-old, hunting a tiny invisible border
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Principle

Fitts's law

People report that resize targets are thin, nearly invisible edges and corners, offset from the cursor hotspot and with no grippers, so a small, hard-to-hit target makes a frequent action slow and error-prone.

A fix

Widen the invisible hit area for resizing to several points beyond the visible border on every edge and corner, and show a resize cursor or subtle highlight as soon as the pointer enters it. Consider a modifier-plus-drag gesture that resizes from anywhere in the window.

Grouping, principle and fix drafted with Claude and reviewed by Justusability. Counts are people whose comment Claude labelled a usability complaint about this issue; see Method for how, and its limits. Something wrong here?

All 85 source comments