[dylan604]

How is alt-tabbing near useless? I find it quite easy/simple. The fact that I often have my left hand on the keyboard and my right hand on the mouse makes it even easier with a quick cmd-tab while leaving the cmd key pressed so that I can mouse click the app icon I want directly without mulitple cmd-tab clicks to cycle to what I want very convenient.

[southerntofu]

> How is alt-tabbing near useless?

I think the parent refers to MacOS/Gnome treating alt-tab as a "switch program" shortcut, not a "switch window" shortcut. I find it very convenient to press "alt-tab" to go to the previously-focused window, or "alt-tab-tab" to the even-previously focused window.

It's much easier for me to think in terms of context switches (go back to my N-previous activity) than have to consciously evaluate whether i want to switch window of the same app or switch app.

[dylan604]

>i want to switch window of the same app or switch app.

That sounds like a total nightmare to have the same keyboard shortcut do 2 different things. Cmd-Tab switches app, Cmd-` switches windows in an app. I just don't understand how that is difficult. Then again, some people find math hard, others find it easy. To each their own.

[yodon]

MacOS is app centric and Windows is document-centric, in large part because of the differences in window management. MacOS window management encourages users to focus on which app is open, leading to users talking about apps rather than documents (I made it in Keynote, Pages, or Numbers). Windows windows management encourages users to focus on which document is open, leading to users talking about documents rather than apps (it's a Word Doc, an Excel Sheet, a PowerPoint Deck). The difference is subtle but significant. If you're a long time MacOS user, you can't imagine not just knowing what app your document/window is hosted in. If you're a long time Windows user, you can't imagine mentally sorting your windows by which app launched them.

This difference almost certainly has its roots back in the dawn of the original Macintosh, which could only run one application at a time and context-switching or Multi-Tasking had to be explicitly added to the OS after the fact[0]. Windows, which was developed later, was designed as an inherently multi-application OS from the beginning. Today, it's pretty much only in the windows management where you still see the vestiges of those original differences.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MultiFinder

[southerntofu]

> I just don't understand how that is difficult.

It's not difficult, but why do they make it difficult to "just go to the previous window", whose default shortcut was alt-tab on almost all systems (windows + gnome + kde)?

Maybe you have a specific workflow with a specific set of apps you use in a specific order in which case your brain is hard-wired to know whether you'd like to switch app or window within an app. I personally find it much easier when i don't have to think about it and can just "go back" to what i was doing previously.

[dylan604]

You seem to have the concept in your mind of open windows vs open apps. I've never thought of it like that, and always have the concept of apps in mind. Not thinking of apps seems as foreign to me as grouping windows as apps seems foreign to you. It would be interesting to see the differences between how either was learned to really grok the difference.

[spiffytech]

> You seem to have the concept in your mind of open windows vs open apps. I've never thought of it like that, and always have the concept of apps in mind.

For me, windows windows tend to be for discrete tasks. E.g., on one space I have a browser for coding stuff, and on another space I'll have a browser for email/chat. So it's important that I can switch to a specific browser window, rather than my viewport being dragged over to another space because that's the last browser I looked at. Same for code editor windows.

macOS' keyboard shortcuts aren't good for this workflow. I understand Mac prefers gesture- or mouse-oriented solutions like Mission Control, but that's a much less ergonomic approach for my needs.

[monsieurbanana]

Everybody that didn't start with mac has that concept of open windows, it shouldn't come as a surprise. If you like the way Apple tells you to do it, it works great. If you don't like it, Apple is bent on taking away customisation options one by one.

I also find the window management in Osx terrible. Thankfully a couple of third-party apps (BetterTouchTool and AltTab) fixes most of the issues.

I'm happy with my mac, but if those third-party solutions stop working, I'd switch back to linux in a heartbeat.

[beingflo]

> Then again, some people find math hard, others find it easy. To each their own.

Way to be condescending. The presented opinion is clearly reasonable, as is yours.

[dylan604]

No condescension intended. It was just a regocnition that what someone finds instinctual others find less so. It was one of the lessons not learned until much later in life for me that allowed me to become much less frustrated when working with others.

[monsieurbanana]

You got it wrong, this is not about finding something more difficult or less instinctual, this is about personal preference.

[alanbernstein]

Let's say you have three browser windows, three terminal windows, and three file manager windows. Also, each window corresponds to a project/task, such that the logical groups are really (browser1, terminal1, files1), etc. Make sense?

Next, you want to show all of the windows from a single task, each one at the highest focus relative to all other windows of the same application.

Only being able to switch applications, rather than individual windows, makes this a tedious, manual process.

I hear you say, "just use..."

- Multiple workspaces: does not play well with changing multi-monitor setups. Does not persist across restarts. (Last time I tried anyway)

- Expose: this is not a keyboard-shortcut friendly interface. Windows-style alt-tab lists are predictable and linear, Expose window arrangements are not.

I just want the interface I already know, that works perfectly for this situation.

[dcow]

The multi-monitor stuff is much better now. I’d revisit. It persists for me across display configuration changes.

[alanbernstein]

Thanks. In the mean time, I've started using the alt-tab tool. This makes my Mac OS experience more closely match my Linux experience, which I also find important now that I'm using both machines with the same KVM devices, on a switch.

[beingflo]

As the other comments mentioned it's due to application instead of window switching. I find it frustrating to alt-tab to some application with no windows (because I closed it but on macOS that doesn't close the app), which only makes the top bar change and is not my intention 99.9% of the time. AltTab instead has sane defaults and allows a lot of customization including multiple shortcuts for different purposes.

[dylan604]

The understanding of an app quitting when the last window is closed is something that I go back and forth on if I like it or not. I think it really depends on the app. Launching Adobe apps take long enough that it is annoying to need to relaunch them, so I really appreciate that they don't quit on close of last window. Yet apps like Lightroom must totally relaunch just to switch to a new library which is extremely frustrating.

So it seems to me that Cmd-Tab is less of the offender to you than the app not behaving as you prefer when there are no active windows. Seems like your ire is slightly misdirected.