| > You might come across a situation, where you want to switch to an application or open a new instance of it. You press (Command ⌘ + Tab) combination. and you don’t get your window, just the title in the menu bar! If you're having that problem then you're not using the Minimize command correctly. Never use Minimize when you intend to switch between apps. You only use Minimize when you explicitly do not want to see a window when its app is active. Typically, it's a rarely used command, but it can occasionally useful when you're working in an app that has a lot of windows open (like, say, Terminal) and you want to set some of the windows aside for awhile. More often, you should use the Hide command. (Command+H, select "Hide" from the app menu, or Option+Click a dock icon.) This will hide the active app and activate the next app in order. When you return to the hidden app via Command+Tab, the app and its windows will be restored just as you left it. In the old NeXTSTEP days, the Hide and Quit commands were top-level menu buttons and always just a single click away. It's unfortunate that those commands were moved to a sub-menu in Mac OS X. I actually wrote a little app that puts Quit and Hide buttons in the top left and right corners of the screen. It gets a lot of use. |
The old Exposé was a hindrance due to lack of proper multi-monitor support. Honestly it was a disaster and mostly unusable. As of a couple versions ago, multi-monitor has worked flawlessly. Mission Control has become indispensable to my daily workflow. Aside from a proper terminal with tools like ssh (seriously, fuck cygwin or Putty as replacements), Mission Control is the reason why OS X is amazing to me, and I can't stand to use Windows which lacks any kind of proper window management. Alt+Tab and Win+Tab on Windows are a joke, and all of the third-party software packages that try to hack on multi-desktop, multi-monitor functionality are a mere shadow of a native implementation. Last time I was forced onto a Windows machine at work, Dexpot was the only software that was even remotely bearable to use, and even then required binding mouse gestures via an additional third-party tool.
If you are reading this and using Cmd+Tab on OS X, do yourself a favor and spend some time retraining yourself to use Mission Control. It will save you so much time hammering the Tab key.