Hacker News Reader

Comment by sudont | Hacker News Reader

Furthermore, what’s with the recent hate on application-level switching? Just about ever “power user” I see nowadays wants Windows 98-esque window switching, despite the fact that the mac window manager is built around an application > window hierarchy.

Personally, it’s one of the most aggravating features I have to deal with on XP, so I can’t understand why anyone would want it on their mac.

View on HN

I find the "application > window" hierarchy breaks horribly Spaces: if you have two windows of the same application in two different spaces (for example, two terminals or two finders) and you focus one window in one space, you go to the other space where the other window was in background and you find it in foreground.

Because of this nuisance I never managed to get used to Spaces.

There are at least three applications where different windows are "morally" different applications: Terminal, Finder and web browser. I should be able to focus individual windows without bringing to foreground the whole application.

In fact, I'd like to be able "attach" a terminal to another app for switching purposes. It's probably the same with finder and browser, (I'd add text editor).

A "one task, one app" type of app should have it's functionally-related windows grouped for switching, but a highly multipurpose app where different windows do not serve different functions should be separate.

This is what I use Multiple Desktops for on Ubuntu - I group applications by task, so that each task has one desktop. Then I just switch between desktops, and very rarely between individual applications (as they don't normally overlap).

Trying to work on Windows without good multiple desktop support is horrid now.

Exactly, that was my point. Applications and "CMD+TAB window groups" should be separate concepts.

Not answering for everyone, of course, but I find the mac model breaks down when I only want to pull a single window of an app to the foreground.

Envisage, if you will, this scenario. I have multiple terminal windows open in the background connected to various services and my current focus is on my fullscreen IDE of choice. Now my IDE has various pieces of information on it and, given that my short term memory isn't what it once was, I would like to always be able refer to it. So I switch to Terminal and ALL the Terminal windows are pulled above the IDE window, often obscuring the piece of information I wanted to reference.

It's not that the 98-esque model is necessarily superior, it's rather that it's surprising when windows you haven't requested to see are pulled into the foreground. Now this may be due to me having used `window-centric` switching for many years but after 3 years of owning a mac I still find this behaviour frustrating.

If you don't mind using the mouse, you can bring a single window to the foreground by right-clicking the corresponding application's Dock icon and selecting it from the list.

Another more visual option (that you can manage with keyboard only) is to use Exposé. In Snow Leopard, press the Exposé key on the keyboard (or set your own shortcut), start typing the name of the window you want, and press return to bring only that window to the foreground.

I've found these to be pretty good built-in solutions to the single-window problem.

You might want to check out Visor - http://visor.binaryage.com/ makes your terminal a roll-down fps-like console, and can handle all the tabs as well. I've found it very useful to solve the exact problem you're having.

I can't live without Visor. Its one of my favorite OS X utilities.

I just realized the other day that you can drag a tab off of visor and use it as a regular terminal window in case you need to look at two terminals at once.

CMD-` switches between application windows. That might help a bit, I use it constantly; so constantly in fact, that I remapped buffer switching in emacs to that command.

I'm a hater of the App -> Windows paradigm. I just brought up two finder windows, minimized one, CMD-TAB'd to Chrome, then back to Finder, and finally no amount of CMD-` would make the minimised Finder visible. Plus, just how many mouse actions does it take to tile two windows? Two in Win7, a whole lot more in OSX.

CMD-` doesn't solve the problem, if you are in an application and you want to bring up a window from another application you still have to use CMD-TAB. But this brings up all the windows from the other application.

Yeah, the best solution here is definitely exposé. Invoke, select just the window you want via arrow keys or beginning to type the window's title, hit return, and only that window comes forward.

You're totally right, I just skimmed the comment before I posted, my bad.

Thanks for posting that. Never knew!

Unfortunately, the traditional way to solve this problem on a mac is to arrange the windows, and remove what wasn't needed. Full-screen apps weren't supposed to be used.

Exactly. And now Lion is going to apparently emphasize full-screening apps. This is a complete 180 by Steve Jobs who has hated full-screen apps as long as I can remember.

Application level switching makes sense to me when you are working using "one app, one task." Switching from my IDE to chat...? sure bring up my both contacts list and chat window.

But a power user is probably using more than one app per task, and is multitasking (or whose task requires many separate subtasks), and of course some of the apps are used in multiple tasks.

It would increase productivity if I could easily bring up the windows I'm using for task a, and switch easily to the windows I'm using for task b, even if textmate and a terminal are in use in both tasks. Yeah yeah, we have spaces... the point is that, for me, while purely window-level switching is a poor solution, app level switching is both a poor and often actually anti-productive solution.

(I, also, am a longtime windows user now using os x. That's definitely a factor, here)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com