>If you need any proof of this, just click the little green dot in the upper left of an open window…

It goes full-screen - isn't that an expected outcome?

"It goes full-screen - isn't that an expected outcome?"

Not exactly ...

First of all, for most of the life of OSX, clicking the green dot caused the window to resize larger, but not occupy full screen, by some measure I could never discern. That was always braindead.

Second of all, while the current behavior that I see (expand to literally full screen) is sort of an improvement (that is, at least it makes some sense) it's still badly behaved because bringing a window to literally full screen blanks out my other monitors (!@#) ... and now we're drifting into OSX treatment of multi-monitors which is another few layers of hell.

FWIW, IMO, the correct behavior is to maximize the window in the workspace - which is almost identical, but not quite, to the literal screen.

>it's still badly behaved because bringing a window to literally full screen blanks out my other monitors

Really? That's not what it does for me. Right at this very moment I have a full screen app running on my MacBook Pro screen and a desktop on my monitor. Do you have "Displays have separate Spaces" turned off in Mission Control preferences?

I rather disbelieve in the idea that these things have "correct" semantics; only "what I am used to". At this point, I'm very used to the way macOS works and I find it considerably more pleasant than other windowing environments. Being able to full screen an app and then multi-swipe left or right between spaces or up for App Exposé is natural to me.

I've no doubt I could unlearn this and learn something else though.

Which version of macos are you running? Maximizing/fullscreening windows works for me on multiple monitors over usb-c.

I routinely have mail.app or Firefox fullscreen in one, with emacs or another browser window fullscreen in the other.

Personally, I would find it far, far more useful if it maximised the window rather than full-screening it. At the very least, having it configurable would be nice.

Holding the option key allows exactly that. Menu item is called 'Zoom' for some reason.

Hmm.. that doesn't quite do what I'm after — make it the full size of the screen. It looks like it's similar to the old macOS behaviour that made the window 'as big as its contents'.

It is exactly that behavior, yes (and that historical oddity is almost certainly why). I wish this was configurable somewhere, and wish the behavior of the green button was also configurable so you could flip it to “maximize with no modifier key, full screen with”.

If you want the application to make the window as large as useful w.r.t its current content (which was the old behavior) you can Option-Click.