What you are looking for is called the "Zoom" command. It resides in the "Window" menu in an app like Chrome. You can assign a keyboard shortcut to "Zoom" and you will have a quick mouseless command for this.
OR
Move the cursor to any one of the four corners of the Window. When the cursor icon changes to a diagonal bi-directional arrow, press and hold the Option key and double click.
This would zoom the window to occupy the entire screen without it entering into full-screen mode.
OR
Double click the application bar
Answer from Nimesh Neema on Stack ExchangeWhat you are looking for is called the "Zoom" command. It resides in the "Window" menu in an app like Chrome. You can assign a keyboard shortcut to "Zoom" and you will have a quick mouseless command for this.
OR
Move the cursor to any one of the four corners of the Window. When the cursor icon changes to a diagonal bi-directional arrow, press and hold the Option key and double click.
This would zoom the window to occupy the entire screen without it entering into full-screen mode.
OR
Double click the application bar
If you want this consistently, you will need to install a third party utility, like Rectangle, Magnet, Moom or several others.
In some cases you can hold Shift ⇧ while clicking the green stoplight button to have a "cover the whole screen, but don't go into full screen mode" behavior, but this depends on the app.
The reason for this is that historically, macOS had no concept of windows covering the whole screen:
In classic MacOS the
widget would make the window change to a size that is best fitting the content of the window. This could enlarge or shrink the window. You can check it out using an online emulation of System 6.MacOS X changed the location and the appearance of the window widgets , but the green stoplight had the same behavior up until OS X 10.9 Mountain Lion.
MacOS X 10.7 Lion added a zoom widget at the right side of the window that would switch the window into full screen mode and back.
OS X 10.10 Yosemite replaced the default behavior of the green stoplight with "full screen". The previous "best fitting size" behavior was moved to two places:
- You could press Option ⌥ while clicking on the green stoplight
- You could double click the window title
This is the behavior up until macOS 10.16 Catalina, so this is what you are experiencing.
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Fn+F does the job! It will maximize and minimize to a full-screen application.
Using macOS 15.2 Sequoia here.
The menu item window->fill, defaults to ⌃F (Ctrl+Fn+f), should do what you want.
The item window->center ⌃C (Ctrl+Fn+c) restores the original size and centers the window.
Menu item window->minimize ⌘M (Cmd+m) minimizes the window.
To remove the spacing around the "filled" window, you have to go to System Settings -> "Desktop & Dock" -> disable the option "Tiled windows have margins"
It's so annoying holding option+clicking to maximise screen - and even then it doesn't always maximise the screen fully...
I’m not sure if this is doable, but I dislike using full screen mode because when I switch to another app, it swipes over to the side. I’d prefer if the second app opened on top instead. Is there a way to either prevent apps from going into full screen mode and just have them maximize instead, or to open apps over full screen windows without them swiping away? It’s really frustrating.
I’ve already tried going to Desktop and Dock > Mission Control and disabling the related options, but that hasn’t fixed the issue. Any suggestions?