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I often move windows around on the desktop by clicking and dragging them by the title bar. As of Lion, you can resize the window from the top, so if you put the cursor in the top portion of the title bar, the icon turns into resize arrows, when I actually want to move the window, not resize it.

Is there a way to turn this new feature off or customize it so resizing from the top is disabled?

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  • 1
    Some additional info, I just noticed that even when the resize "up-down" cursor is displayed when resizing at the top, a left or right mouse movement will allow me to move the window. This is thoughtful touch by the apple designers. My question still stands, though. Jul 21, 2011 at 14:58
  • Too soon to say :p Let us play a little bit more with the final version before finding these tricks :p`` Jul 21, 2011 at 15:50
  • I wish I had better news than "No" - but it's likely this was thought over long and hard. The new way is built into the window manager. Hopefully some clever hack can help, your use case is both logical and compelling.
    – bmike
    Aug 9, 2011 at 19:17

3 Answers 3

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Based on mjmt's excellent info, here's how to globally disable resizing (tested in 10.7.4):

defaults write -globalDomain AppleEdgeResizing NO

Log out and log back into your account (or quit every single app) to see changes take effect.

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Lion has (at least for now) the following preference keys:

AppleEdgeResizing (boolean)
AppleEdgeResizeBorderSize
AppleEdgeResizeCornerSize
AppleEdgeResizeCornerSizeNW
AppleEdgeResizeCornerSizeNE
AppleEdgeResizeCornerSizeSW
AppleEdgeResizeCornerSizeSE
AppleEdgeResizeExteriorSize


These can be accessed either with either the following commands:

defaults read DOMAIN KEY
defaults write DOMAIN KEY VALUE
defaults delete DOMAIN KEY

Where DOMAIN can be either -globalDomain to affect all apps, or a specific app's identifier e.g.: com.apple.TextEdit

Or edit ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist or other .plist file thereabouts, in Xcode or some other Property List editor.

Apps need to be restarted before they'll recognize any changes.

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Not currently configurable or able to be turned off by any out of the box control or setting.

It's meant to be always on and you'll likely need a third party solution (or a hidden default setting like the other answers have provided) to change the logic behind the resizing.

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