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Comment by nneonneo | Hacker News Reader

Cmd+` switches between windows of the same app, and it's actually more convenient (IMHO) than using Alt+Tab to switch between every one of your windows from every app. There are also a handful of trackpad gestures for showing all the windows in the current app or all of your windows.

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As long as you haven't made the active window full screen, or the window you want to switch to, then yes, it works. But it is painful :P

That's one of the reasons I never make windows full-screen.

Except for that annoying quirk, I actually find the interface better (though it definitely took time to get used to it).

I prefer windows to be full screen. Then I three-finger swipe between apps on my trackpad.

I get that. I just use an app that lets me maximize windows with a shortcut (I use Size-up but there are many great options). I then make sure to maximize everything, so effectively all my windows are always maximized.

It's not the same as fullscreen, because it still has the top mac bar, but that's fine, and it gives me the ability to cmd+tab / cmd+tilde through my windows.

> As long as you haven't made the active window full screen, or the window you want to switch to, then yes, it works. But it is painful :P

What's being described as "full screen" windows on macOS is not exactly that, and it's very different than full screen windows on Windows or the standard Linux window managers.

On macOS, when we click on the little green button on top of a window, that window becomes full screen *and* becomes a new single-window workspace.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/use-apps-in-full-sc...

You can "Maximize" the app (to put it in Windows parlance) by Option+Click the green button (you can observe during the hover state for the green button the change from "full screen" to "maximize" by pressing Option).

Or even just double-click the window‘s title bar. Just like on Windows

It's inconsistent compared with alt-tab behaviour.

cmd-tab switches to the last used application (assuming you don't hold down), right now for me that switches from Firefox to Slack.

Pressing cmd-tab again switches from Slack back to Firefox.

However for window switches

cmd-` switches from my HN window to a jira window. cmd-` again switches to a webmail window. To switch from jira back to HN I have to press cmd-shift-`

Exactly, and believe it or not, this strange little inconsistency is the only thing I still can't get used to after using macOS for ~15 years.

If you press Cmd-Tab, then let go, and press Cmd-Tab again, yes, you get back to the first application you were in.

If you press Cmd-Tab, hold Cmd, and keep hitting Tab, you cycle through the available applications.

If you press Cmd-`, get the window you want, and do something in it, then press Cmd-` again, you get back to the first window you were in.

If you press Cmd-` repeatedly, you cycle through the available windows of the active application.

There is a slight difference in how you trigger the two behaviours—and the behaviour of Cmd-` can sometimes be a little opaque, I grant, since "do something in the window" is not always 100% clear, either to the user or the computer—but they do have analogous behaviours.

Press Cmd, Press `, Release `, Release Cmd

You've swapped from window 1 to window 2

Press Cmd, Press `, Release `, Release Cmd

You swap from window 2 to window 3

Press Cmd, Press tab, Release tab, Release Cmd

You've swapped from application 1 to application 2

Press Cmd, Press tab, Release tab, Release tab

You swap from application 2 to application 1

That if you type something after swapping window and the behaviour changes is even worse!

For cycling

Press Cmd, Press Tab, release Tab, Press Tab, Release Tab, you can move from application 1 to application 3, although it doesn't switch immediately, just shows you a menu while you hold down Cmd

Do this with windows and the actual window changes as you move, not a menu

It's poor behaviour and one reason I prefer my linux desktop to my anicent macbook. (Another reason, I've got about 15 opwn terminals, but I can't just raise 1 terminal window above my browser, I have to raise them all. Of course there's no focus-follows-mouse either, it's all very user-unfriendly, at least by default. I'm sure there's some software that might fix this, but back in the 90s when I was using Windows I remember that sort of software was just terrible. The easier option is to finally fix my linux laptop, which died around the time covid started, and thus wasn't a critical path fix)

I filed a big report about this years ago. Please do the same so that Apple knows this bothers people.

Edit: it didn’t behave this way before 2009

And it seems that it doesn’t behave that way in every program. Firefox seems to be doing it correctly (most of the time anyway)

except windows is still king because the preview shows the instance instead of an application

Cmd tilde instantly switches between windows, so there is no preview and so your comment doesn’t really make sense.

If you’re talking about cmd-tab, personally I’ll take big recognizable icons than thumbnails with minuscule text and such any day.

And mission control will give you windows previews if you want them.

ctrl+up / ctrl+down

Ctrl+Down is useful for navigating intra application, but Ctrl+Up is a ridiculous mess.

I prefer binding "Move focus to next window" to the F12 key. Since Cmd+` is a hard keyboard combo on non-american keyboards.

I kind of gave up on non-US keyboards.

The Portuguese layout sucks horribly for programming, especially on the Mac (brackets in horrible places), and the U.K. layout (where I’m based) sucks horribly for writing Portuguese in. The US international just works for all my purposes (including writing tiny amounts of other languages besides Portuguese and English)

Have you tried this one ?

http://norme-azerty.fr/en/

That looks like an "AZERTY International", with no advantage over the Portuguese layout for programming, and no advantage over "US International" for typing languages other than French. It does look like an improvement over traditional AZERTY!

My choice is "US International with AltGr deadkeys". The deadkey behaviour in simple "US International" is very annoying for programming: you have to double-tap every key that could be an accent, such as single quotes or backquotes.

> no advantage over "US International" for typing languages other than French

Uh, did you not even bother to click on the link or something ??

The easy access to all Greek characters (and more math symbols) alone is great if you work in a math-related field !

Yes I clicked but didn't notice the Greek overlay. It's neat. I imagine that it can be useful for math, if you're not using something like LaTeX or Emacs already. I even have something similar in my custom layout, although it seldom gets any use. That does not make it any better for programming, nor for typing in Portuguese (or even Greek).

Look, I think it's great that this thing exists and grateful that you mentioned it. I may even suggest it to some of the French-speaking juniors I work with.

It does not, however, address the issues of the person you were replying to. And I know because I'm in a similar position to them.

Just checking you're aware that dead keys for all Portuguese diacritics are available in the UK PC layout - alt+e (´), alt+n (˜), alt+\ (`), alt+c (ç), alt+i (ˆ)

Because I never went back to the Portuguese layout after finding those key combinations.

Not only trackpad, you can use ctrl+down to show all windows of the current app and ctrl+up to see all windows.

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