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Listen, I don't know what you're using your computer for, but I have five terminal windows open. One of them is IRC, one of them is reorganizing my videos, and one of them is running mtr so that when I notice a network problem I can see how long it's been going on and where it is. These windows have nothing to do with each other. It is not beneficial for the mtr window to be lumped in with the IRC window. If I'm switching back and forth between IRC, reorganizing my videos, and my browser, I do not want to deal with mtr. I do not want to deal with the window where I was running the compiler yesterday. I am not interested in the fact that the window where I'm reading a man page is "one application", the window where I'm reading Server Fault is "another application", and the window where I'm looking at a PDF about LVM is "a third application"; I'm interested in what I'm trying to get done, not what program happens to have opened the window that I'm doing it in. If I'm switching back and forth between the LVM PDF and the pvs man page and the shell window where I'm actually running LVM commands, I do not want to have to deal with the other fifteen unrelated terminal windows I may have open. I don't want to have to think about which kind of windows I'm switching between every time I switch windows, especially on this ten-inch netbook, where I run everything fullscreen. In short, for the way I use my computer, the Alt-`/Alt-Tab dichotomy doesn't make sense. It turns what used to be a zero-effort action — switch back to the previous window — into an error-prone action that is likely to take me to something unrelated to what I'm trying to do. And now it's a zero-effort action again, since I stopped trying to use GNOME or Unity. How do you use your computer that this makes sense to you? I don't mean to imply that you're insane, since I recognize that people do not all use their computers the same way, but I can't imagine how you're using your computer that enforcing this dichotomy is actually helpful to you. (Note: I do use tabbed browsing, because, sad to say, Firefox still takes five seconds to open a new window. That's seven billion clock cycles, one clock cycle for every man, woman, and child alive today.) |
Fixing alt-tab is one of the first things I do.