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by gingerlime 2496 days ago
One thing I sorely miss after switching from Linux to Mac is i3. Spetactle gets close, but something as trivial(?) as switching window focus with the keyboard I couldn't figure out a solution for... Can Keyboard Maestro do it?
4 comments

I personally use Contexts (https://contexts.co) for switching between applications. It functions similar to rofi's application switcher (fuzzy keyboard driven switching).

There are a couple of automatic tiling window managers for MacOS, the most notable being Yabai (https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai) and Amethyst (https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst).

Yabai doesn't handle window switching on its own but it can use SKHD (https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd) or any other application that can bind terminal commands to keyboard shortcuts such as Hammerspoon (https://www.hammerspoon.org) or BetterTouchTool (https://folivora.ai) or even Keyboard Maestro. The commands are context-aware of spaces and the placement of windows on the x-y plane so you can move between windows relative to their position on the screen.

I haven’t used i3, but I missed good keyboard context switching support when I started using macOS. There’s some reasonable solutions out there, but my current favorite interface customizer is BetterTouchTool, which is setup to let you customize any input for any kind of OS function you might want. I have a 4-monitor setup so easy window/tile management is important to me. I have a handful of keyboard chords to put windows on the screen/quadrant combo that I want. My TouchBar is permanently set to media keys with media info + notification area + emoji keyboard. For keyboard control over focus, I use the Contexts app inter-app and ShortCat within app.
Depends on your use-case. KM comes with an app-switcher out of the box that looks like this and can be controlled via Keyboard:

https://puu.sh/E9qyC/cdbeb9ce4c.png

On another note, highly recommend Puush (https://puush.me/) for instantly taking and sharing screenshots without having to manually upload.

Anyhow, you're more likely looking for something like Amethyst.

https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

Switching between windows of the same application:

https://superuser.com/questions/299241/in-mac-os-what-is-the...