Disable Full Screen in El Capitan?

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Level 1

11 points

Disable Full Screen in El Capitan?

After much resistance I finally upgraded to El Capitan... call me old school, but I'm not loving that when I maximize a window in El Capitan that it makes it full screen or that every time I switch apps I'm treated to an iPhone like swipe animation. Despite much searching, I'm not finding a way to disable this behavior, so I figured I'd ask the community if there is a way to turn off full screen functionality across the board or if I just need to roll back to my OS?

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014), OS X El Capitan (10.11.2)

Posted on Dec 29, 2015 9:00 AM

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Answer 1

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,258 points

Dec 29, 2015 9:10 AM in response to jacobcdietz

You can't alter the behavior that Apple changed for the Zoom button. I asked, they said, "no."

You can hold down the option key when clicking on the green dot and it will Zoom, again.

You can also set Double-click in title bar Zooms in Dock System Preferences.

I'm not sure I understand the second part. You can disable the swipe gestures in the Trackpad System Prefs, but Cmd-Tab switching doesn't swipe between apps for me.

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Answer 2

jacobcdietz Author

Level 1

11 points

Dec 29, 2015 9:11 AM in response to Barney-15E

Option click actually helps a lot, so thanks for that!

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Answer 3

Apr 10, 2016 10:02 PM in response to jacobcdietz

Did you ever figure this out? Cmd_tab when an app is in fullscreen is highly nauseating..And pretty pointless..

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Answer 4

Apr 29, 2016 9:46 AM in response to jacobcdietz

The full screen itself could be tolerated. With one important exception. If I have a program with one full screen window and other windows not in full screen (e.g. thunderbird mail with a search window and a compose email window), it seems I cannot cycle through them all if I'm in the fullscreen mode.

I have to first cmd-tab to another app, then cmd-tab to thunderbird and then cycle through all the non-full-screen windows with cmd-'

I don't like it.

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