AltTab: Windows Alt-Tab on macOS | Hacker News Reader

AltTab: Windows Alt-Tab on macOS

github.com

39 pointsdavidbarker47 comments

This application and another one called rectangle (for managing window location easily) is what makes Mac os life bearable for me.

The computer to me is a tool and thus switching window / focus should be swift and efficient.

KDE lets me do that out of the box, other DEs needs addons it seems..

The problem with original macos cmd-tab / and in-app window switching is that it gives you two levels of switching. For the same reason I'm not a fan of tabs in browsers.

I don't want to keep track of which app a window/page is opened in. I want to get to it as fast as my thoughts realize I need to get there.

Most often I work in 2-3 windows in different apps, so quick jumping back and forth is crucial and alttab is a simple and fast way of doing it.

Yep I second this, Alt+Tab and Rectangle are must haves.

> For the same reason I'm not a fan of tabs in browsers.

I _really_ wish there were a proper integration of tabs into window-switching shortcuts... like some kind of modifier. It would be excellent to be able to transition smoothly between 1) Application switching 2) Window switching 3) Tab switching. 1) -> 2) works on Mac OS with cmd + tab, down arrow when you reach the application, and then arrows to navigate... but it would be great to drill down into tabs in a nice way from there. Or even directly from application switching to tab switching, since one can quickly forget exactly which window a particular tab is in.

Witch (https://manytricks.com/witch/) has an option that allows you to treat tabs as if they’re windows, but over time I’ve found Witch more and more buggy and gave up on using it, which is such a shame.

I agree, "alt tab" with "tab support" would be nice.

But it's equally nice to use Firefox, turn off tabs, and let the window manager do it's magic (uh.. with a little help form alttab if youre on osx;)

The difference between alt tab/alt ~ is a feature not a design flaw. If you have a lot of windows open (I’m sure you do!) it’s a godsend not to tab through 50 of them.

If you miss that on Windows: https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/easy-window-switcher/

I too enjoy the distinction between the two. The lack of grouping on Windows makes window switching get really messy really quickly (especially now with Edge injecting tabs into alt-tab too). It’s one of the things that makes Windows unpleasant to work in for me.

It's intentional, but also a poorly implemented feature.

How exactly are you supposed to cmd+~ on a Danish keyboard? To type a tilde you need to option+¨, then space.

Secondly, switching windows uses a strict ordering, e.g., alt+~ doesn't return you to the previous window (at least that's how I remember it working, can't check it on my Danish keyboard, so how would I know?), but cmd+tab does return you to the previous active application.

You can rebind the shortcut in System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> All Applications -> Move Focus to Next Window

I’m not sure. Surely there’s someone from apple here that would be interested in solving that.

…why?

Neither the readme nor the official website seem to explain why I would want this. I guess it’s supposed to be self evident, but it’s not to me.

The two main reasons I like it so far:

1. I can now Cmd+Tab through all windows, rather than through all apps. (For example, say I have Mail and 4 Safari windows open, the standard macOS Cmd+Tab will just let me flip between Mail and Safari at a general level, but AltTab will let me switch through all of those 5 windows.)

2. Screenshots of all windows as you're switching.

That’s what command-backtick is for. It cycles between windows in a single application.

For #2 I’d just use Expose.

But thanks for answering my question. It’s been a long time since I used windows so I didn’t know (or forgot) there was a difference.

You're welcome. I do use Cmd+` when I'm already in the app that I want to switch between the windows of, but I like the ability with this app where I can switch straight to the window I want no matter what app I'm currently in.

I've also tried (and paid for) Witch, but it can often be slow and the screenshot feature isn't great.

The problem with expose is it is slow. You need to visually search for the right window, then select it.

(Unlike the equivalent in KDE that lets you filter by window title by just typing)

FYI, from cmd+tab you can use the down arrow to get to the window level of the application (then arrow keys to navigate through the windows).

Because natively with macos you need to use both: 1. cmd+tab to the app you want 2. once on that app you need to use cmd+~ to navigate through the windows of that app.

Alt-Tab allows you to bypass all this and just cmd+tab through all windows of all apps. I find it incredibly useful.

If you ever tried to switch between windows on macOS, you'd know why ;)

Cmd-Tab on macOS doesn't switch between windows, but between applications. And to switch between windows in the same application, there's a separate shortcut. It's a real mess.

This may be a “it’s different from what you’re used to” rather than a “real mess”. Personally I much prefer using different shortcuts to do different things, but that’s likely because I’m engrained in the Mac-style habits instead of the windows ones —- to me, just based on your description, it sounds much worse to have a big pile of unsorted windows to step through instead of being able to jump to the application I want and then step through a much smaller list of windows within it like I can on my Mac.

I prefer that I have control over whether I’m switching between apps or between windows. Throwing them all into the same search space is also “a real mess”.

Nice! An alternative that also has incremental window search is https://contexts.co/

But this looks like a great option for people looking for a free option to just get windows alt tab like functionality.

Contexts doesn’t really look maintained

Last update I installed was mid August?

Still Why?

use COMMAND + ~ keys to switch between same app windows.

Because sometimes you want to be able to switch between the windows of all apps instead of switching apps and then switching windows.

But why are windows grouped by application to begin with? When I used Macos I could never get used to the way it treated windows, and it is primarily the reason I use Windows today. But now Windows 11 is forcing grouping taskbar buttons by application (ungrouping was always an option before), and I don't know why.

I think it mostly derives from the fact that macOS has a far more cohesive concept of "application" than Windows does. A Mac app's files are managed as a group (the app bundle), execution is managed at the app level (traditionally, closing the last window did not quit the application), window visibility can be managed at the app level (show/hide as an alternative to minimizing). So cycling through apps is a very natural thing to include as well, and once that shortcut exists it makes a bit more sense to have a second shortcut to cycle within an app's windows than through all visible windows. Especially once Apple introduced Exposé/Mission Control, there really wasn't much need for a shortcut to cycle through the full list of windows, because there are plenty of other ways to select the window you want in fewer steps.

I might be missing something, but how do you efficiently switch apps in expose?

What I meant was that Exposé pretty much provided the missing purely window-oriented switching interface to complement the app-oriented interfaces that already existed. So once Exposé/Mission Control existed, there was even less need for a Windows-style Alt-Tab equivalent shortcut.

Don’t forget the Dock that represents all the running applications.

Which sucks if you like me want to keep virtual spaces (or desktops) separated. I only want to see windows (or apps) running on the current desktop in the dock, which kind of breaks that (apple app) model i suppose. This is doable in windows (and a few DEs in linux) but not in Mac OS unfortunately.

Back in the earlier days of classic Mac OS you would only see the windows of one application at a time. I think it's a leftover of that philosophy.

It appears you can still tell Windows 11 not to group buttons through a registry key:

  [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
  "NoTaskGrouping"=dword:00000001

Source: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/issues/9

That's only if you've patched in the old Windows 10 taskbar into Windows 11. Which I don't want to do for various reasons.

Wow, i didn't know that Window 11 is forcing grouping of windows. This is pretty my biggest problem with Mac OS which is why i always stayed with Windows. No reason to do so any more i guess.

I used Karabiner Elements for this since I move among OS's often. KE can also be programmed to do it conditionally and move the Cmd keys.

I’ve long had this gripe with MacOS. Many years ago made a flowchart to demonstrate the difference: https://wanderingstan.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/alt-tab...

That flowchart seems to assume that you don’t know what application has the window you want, which is a pretty weird use case. And ignores that you can see all windows for a given application in the menu bar.

Thank you!! I have returned to MacOS due to M1 but I missed this and have only discovered “rectangle”.

anyone know if there is the opposite for windows, where alt tab will switch between applications not windows

Yup; that’s one of the few things that I missed when I left macOS so I wrote a tiny app that adds that functionality to Windows. Free download: https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/easy-window-switcher/

I actually mostly only missed that and iMessage; the latter of which led to this very long story: https://neosmart.net/blog/2018/imessage-for-windows/

Couldn't you have used https://airmessage.org/ ?

That wasn’t around (this was five to six years ago).

Oh, ok!

Thanks! This is great for one piece of the puzzle, but it's being able to switch to an app and all it's windows come forward that I miss the most.

Oh, I intentionally did not include that because I found it to be anti-pattern. I most often have a terminal window and one other window from another app (browser, editor, etc) visible at once as a sort of "in-tandem active pair" and would hate if switching to the specific browser window I want (via a keyboard shortcut) would cause other browser windows to come to the foreground as well, obscuring the second half of what I am currently working on (just because it's from another app).

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