Wow, my experience couldn't be more different. I think my biggest annoyance is how ⌘-Tab ignores different windows of the same program, so I constantly have to switch between ⌘-Tab and ⌘-`.
You can also switch with Command+Tab and once you hover over the application you want, you can press Command+Down Arrow (or Up Arrow or even Key 1) and that will show you all windows within that application (the same as Control+Down Arrow). Notice that each window has a title and you can press the initial letter and that window will get focus. You can then press Enter to select it.
In this specific use case, I found all the little differences between Windows and MacOS window switching to end up adding together in Window's favor fairly significantly.
First, select the application that you want to use now. All windows from that application, across all monitors are now brought to the front. Then, you switch to the window you want to use. Most of these windows have no clear way of communicating to the user that it is active, so you have to look at each of the available windows to see if it's active or not.
Let's say that I have a monitor with three terminal windows on. I don't want to close them or minimize them, as I will need them again shortly. Now, I want to open a browser window above those three terminal windows, so I open it. Now, I want to move a single one of those terminal windows on top of the browser window, while keeping the other two below the browser window. Nope, not possible. On Mac, I have to use the mouse to pick the right terminal window to achieve this.
It probably just depends on your particular workflows whether the good outweighs the bad or the other way around.
My main point is that a window is a window. The app to which that window belongs means essentially nothing to me, I don't think there needs to be a separate hot-key for cycling windows-per-application, I do not find it to be a usefull organizational tool for switching between windows. I am aware of ctrl+tab but that seems to be a generally accepted program-level control not something from the operating system level.
Minor annoyances:
MacOS's cmd+tab visualization has a slight delay before appearing. This seems to be intentional and provides a nice experience when you know for certain that the selected window of the previously selected application is what you want to switch to; quickly tapping cmd+tab switches directly to that window without the visualization. On windows, the alt+tab visualization always renders immediately. I prefer the windows way because frequently the window I want is maybe 2 or 3 back. So I can more quickly locate it visually through the visualization that pops up on alt+tab.
On MacOS, that visualization I just mentioned does not have separate selection for mouse/keyboard in the cmd+tab menu. What this means is that if an errant mouse cursor passes the visualization while you are cmd+tab'ing to some application, the mouse will scramble your selection. On Windows, there are two separate selectors, one for alt+tab (confirmed by releasing alt) and one for mouse selection (standard point + click). MacOS does support both mouse and keyboard but they share the same selection and interfere with eachother. I know this sounds like an unlikely case but I actually find it quite common -- moving the cursor towards the anticipated area of interest in the soon-to-be-focused window while alt+tabbing will frequently pass through the area of the screen where the alt+tab visualization renders.
Why doesn't MacOS have an intuitve way to maximize a window? This drives me insane. It really feels very reasonable to me to want to see the system clock/tray/etc but have a window take up all other available space. This really feels like a fundamental window-control interaction to me and it is not the same as full screen. I do not understand why MacOS does not have this and why it does not seem to bother other people.
That's a Microsoft Windows paradigm, copied by Gnome and KDE. Systems 1-8 and OS 9 had no mechanism for making a window full screen, much like LisaOS and Xerox Star 8010 IS before it and NeXTSTEP/macOS continued this. It's just never been a part of the UI as it doesn't really fit with the desktop metaphor.
Oh, nice! Thanks for this.
They get even the simplest things wrong. Instead of labeling app menu items with a word or abbreviation, they use a freaking symbol that isn’t printed anywhere on the keyboard.
They have more 2-handed / 3+ key shortcuts than any other OS despite lacking the ability to let you control every aspect of the macOS GUI like you can with Windows or most Linux DEs.
It’s laughable to me that anyone thinks it’s a good system and I’d love to see a productivity contest between workers who are experts in their respective OSes. Mac people would lose miserably. There’s no doubt in mind after years of working with and watching Mac users pitiful attempts at doing anything quickly or efficiently.
> They have more 2-handed / 3+ key shortcuts than any other OS despite lacking the ability to let you control every aspect of the macOS GUI like you can with Windows or most Linux DEs.
What are you trying to say here with “every aspect”?
Mac window management is the opposite of tiling window management. Windows is some sort of hybrid with the snap-to functionality. I wouldn’t say that one or the other is more effective or efficient—Mac trackpad gestures for switching between virtual desktops definitely beat alt-tabbing in Windows (although Windows 10 now finally has virtual desktops as well). They’re different workflows that you can’t expect to immediately find familiar. A “productivity contest” would likely show nearly identical results on both operating systems for the kinds of tasks that users do on a daily basis because they’ve already gotten used to doing those tasks. Switching between terminal windows, text editors, and web browsers is pretty fast on both Windows and macOS.
Apple has loads of symbols for their keys. There's the modifier keys ⌘(cmd), ⌃(ctrl), ⌥(alt), ⇧(shift) and ⇪(caps-lock), of which shift and caps-lock are missing on the magic keyboard (in addition to ctrl and alt on the macbook in front of me).
Then there's ⇥(tab), ↩(return), ⌫(delete) and ⎋(escape) to name a few. These can and do all show up in menus and documentation. With all the control they have over their hardware and software you'd think they could do better than linux on their own hardware (super and backspace are wrong, but the rest are correct at least on this macbook).
You cannot control the entirety of macOS with just a keyboard.
Simple example: open the About this Mac window. Now switch away from it with the keyboard. I challenge you to switch back to that window with just the keyboard without installing any third-party software that changes the way that you handle window switching. Same goes for any window that you open from an app that is running in the menu bar.
With better operating systems, I can put focus on and work with any aspect of the GUI. macOS is extremely limited in this area.
They don’t even have an easily discoverable process for hunting through app menus with just the keyboard. On Windows, there is a thing called a keyboard acceleration. It happens when you hit alt plus the underlined letter of a menu item.
This is why users with disabilities, like Stephen Hawking have historically used Windows and not Mac.
Yes, you can. There's an option in System Preferences called "Full Keyboard Access" to enable this.
> They don’t even have an easily discoverable process for hunting through app menus with just the keyboard.
macOS does it better: you can search all the menus with ⌘?.
> This is why users with disabilities, like Stephen Hawking have historically used Windows and not Mac.
Users with disabilities use Macs, I don't know what you're talking about. Macs are generally miles ahead in accessibility. Stephen Hawking was extremely attached to the one synthesizer he used, to the point that a team of engineers went through the effort to port that exact 30-year-old voice: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/The-Silicon-Vall...
Unless you’re suggesting that the OS-provided controls don’t consistently implement the OS-provided shortcuts. That does sounds like a concern, but in the case of Zoom, it still assumes Zoom used the default widgets.
The Zoom interface on Mac seems very unlike a Mac app to me. It has that flat quality you get in Electron apps. It wouldn't be surprised if it was highly bespoke. You can’t even open the preferences with CMD-, which almost every app implements.
I don’t think Zoom is the only app that doesn’t have everything in the menu bar. The point was more general for when things aren’t in the menu bar (and not just electron apps)
Keyboard Maestro or something else may be able to automate it. But still.
Just FYI, they've corrected this since then. I'm not sure but I believe it was 2017. At that time they also removed the "alt" label so it only says "option" along with the symbol.
This is the height of usability?
How's that work for say...a program running in the menubar, like Docker? (If you open the Docker settings window from the menubar, switch away and switch back.) I bet it doesn't.
> start the program again
Case in point. On mac, choosing (through the dock, through Cmd+Tab, through Finder, through Spotlight, through terminal) an already open program has the semantics of giving it focus. On windows, it opens multiple copies. Sometimes.
It’s an extension of the desktop metaphor. In a Mac, the distinction between an open app and a closed one is fuzzier than on Windows. In a Mac, you have A Mac and it helps you do things, and the Mac tends to the applications for you. In Windows, you have a computer with an OS that hosts applications that help you do things. The distinction is irrelevant when considered from the hardware outward, but is subtly but powerfully different when considered from the user inwards.
It doesn't start the program again. Mac OS is smart enough to know if the program is already running and just switches to it.
Three-finger-up + click is way smoother than doing a random walk through your open windows.
It also lends discoverability to multiple desktops at exactly the moment where you might be thinking to yourself "hmm, I could use multiple desktops right about now."
> With better operating systems, I can put focus on and work with any aspect of the GUI.
I'm glad you feel that way because when I use Windows I quickly get frustrated by apps stealing the focus and authorization windows opening underneath everything else.
> They don’t even have an easily discoverable process for hunting through app menus with just the keyboard.
lolwut? Cmd+? opens a box to incrementally search all menus, Ctrl+P and Ctrl+N let you navigate the results, and return runs the menu item. Arrow keys let you walk the focus if you don't know emacs shortcuts, and they do so in every menu. It's head and shoulders above Windows.
Ummm, the challenge was to use the keyboard though? No amount of rationalization will convince me that taking hands your hands off the keyboard is smoother than leaving them on.
I do enjoy watching junior devs struggling to find their lost full-screen workspace window by swiping furiously sideways with their trackpad though. For even more ridiculousness, I know I can always get a minute to read some news after I ask them to open Chrome devtools and wait while they try to get back to the original Chrome window afterwards.
> lolwut? Cmd+? opens a box to incrementally search all menus, Ctrl+P and Ctrl+N let you navigate the results, and return runs the menu item.
Pffft, okay. You don't even know the difference between searching and hunting. They're completely different operations, for different purposes. There is a way to hunt through menus with macOS, but like all Apple shortcuts it's completely obtuse.
No amount of rationalization will convince me that Windows shortcuts for accessibility are more productive than using your mouse in appropriate situations (some X11 tiling WMs do a better job, yes). See, I can make statements like this too.
> I do enjoy watching junior devs struggling to find their lost full-screen workspace window by swiping furiously sideways with their trackpad though. For even more ridiculousness, I know I can always get a minute to read some news after I ask them to open Chrome devtools and wait while they try to get back to the original Chrome window afterwards.
That's nice; you enjoy watching fledglings who don't know what they're doing struggle to use their tools effectively. That says nothing about achievable productivity in an environment.
Yep. You can say whatever you want. I have never seen a mixed mouse and keyboard user do things faster or more efficiently than a pure keyboard user. Pure scientific empirical evidence is on my side and no amount of rationalization will change the fact that keyboard shortcuts are faster once you learn them. You can read about some studies surrounding this here:
https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/30682/are-there-any-r...
> That's nice; you enjoy watching fledglings who don't know what they're doing struggle to use their tools effectively.
Sure. Who doesn't? There are whole sub-reddits dedicated to this type of comedic performance.
> That says nothing about achievable productivity in an environment.
Yes, it does. That they resort to constantly using the trackpad to swipe between speaks loudly to the lack of obvious keyboard functionality.
You‘ve clearly never watched anyone use any kind of CAD or graphics application in that case!
The challenge was to get to a window, quickly. The keyboard was your constraint.
> I do enjoy watching junior devs struggling
Funny, I enjoy watching the windows crowd alt-tab-tab-tab-tab-tab-tab-tab-tab ah were was it again?
> Pffft, okay. You don't even know the difference between searching and hunting.
Now you're playing with definitions to hide the fact that you were wrong.
> like all Apple shortcuts it's completely obtuse.
Not if you learn them. You clearly did it before, so get off your butt and do it again.
Personally, I love having emacs-style Ctrl+PN and Ctrl+FB navigation available everywhere, and I love the fact that with copy/paste on Cmd+CV I don't have to worry about where a terminal app moved Ctrl+C off to.
Incorrect. My challenge, that you responded to in an article about keyboard shortcuts was about using the keyboard. You failed miserably and your comment got disappeared for it. Try harder xP
> Funny, I enjoy watching the windows crowd alt-tab-tab-tab...
Sure, you can have newbs on any platform. The difference is that Windows and Windows-inspired desktop environments like XFCE are vastly more configurable than anything on a Mac - where it's Apple's way or the highway. You're stuck with Apple's choices unless you hack your OS with third party apps to fix them.
> Now you're playing with definitions to hide the fact that you were wrong.
You're wearing your ignorance like a badge of pride. Learn about UX if you don't understand the difference between searching and hunting. There's a world of difference.
> Not if you learn them.
That's my entire point. Windows shortcuts easily discoverable since they are clearly labeled; no weird symbols that don't exist anywhere on the keyboard and there are fewer of them since the same shortcuts work everywhere. Plus you can tab to focus everywhere instead of pushing a mouse pointer thousands of miles a year to get where you want.
> Personally, I love having emacs-style Ctrl+PN and Ctrl+FB navigation available everywhere...
And yet, you think constantly swapping between keyboard and mouse is "smooth". Makes sense!
I'm pretty sure this is, like, your opinion, dude.
I use an app called Contexts which hijacks ⌘+` with extra functionality (and includes fullscreen windows), but it seems to be abandoned so I fear it will stop working eventually.
It makes alt-tab not suck. It lets me search to switch apps. It lets me switch back to minimized apps. It is really is the perfect utility.
Having both in the same area of the keyboard makes my brain happy.
https://bahoom.com/hyperswitch
Its developer hasn't been updating it or fixing bugs for a long time now, but it remains the best 'alt-tab' for macOS in my book.
Trying to soon foray into consulting/coaching including [productivity enhancing] apps and workflows. This is a nice boost before going to sleep.