Hacker News Reader

Comment by tutysara | Hacker News Reader

Yup this alt+tab switching behavior change is a real pain for me.I was under the impression that this is an issue only with Unity/Gnome3, now I got to know the actual place from where it all started. After seeing this change consistently across all the major UIs, I am starting to feel that this change in alt+tab behavior should have some strong reason for doing so and I am not aware of its actual purpose/use. I would be glad to know from someone on how this feature has simplified their work or improved their productivity.

View on HN

I'm guessing the justification is that switching apps is consistent with the fact that the OS X Dock shows apps, not windows. Probably Unity & Gnome 3 made the alt-tab change to match their move to the Dock model?

Whatever the reason, they're wrong for us power users. And possibly for intermediate & beginners users as well.

I prefer the Mac way. I'm stuck using Windows at work, and it's annoying to have to Alt-Tab through the last five Excel (or mail or whatever) documents to get back to the editor. I much prefer to be able to go the application I want, then find the document within it that I'm looking for.

Then again, I'm not doing web development, so I'm not trying to cycle between my editor and one particular browser window.

I don't think it's a power-user vs. beginner issue; it's more of a workflow style issue.

It's not really personal preference if that's what you mean. It's about your work splits across apps & windows.

For example, chat is mostly fine. I'm either switching between multiple chat windows or mentally switching from chat to another task in which case I have no problem switching out of the whole chat app.

The same setup goes wrong when one chat window is for work, and I'm going back and forth with another non-chat work window.

No, I'm not saying it's preference. I think we agree, actually. By "workflow", I meant the way your particular work tends to split across apps and windows.

For me, it's a better default to switch entire applications than windows. There are edge cases, sure, like the chat one you mention, or different browser windows, but I'd rather just switch from Excel to IE to Outlook than have to tab through my history of open documents and browser tabs (curse you IE) to get back to my Outlook window.

It sounds like for you, it's the opposite: the better default would be to switch windows, not apps.

The question then is which is the most common pattern, but I don't know of any actual research on this. You can't generalize from personal experience, plural of anecdote and all that.

I'm finding it a bit painful on Unity now too, but I'm wondering whether the problem is actually with the terminal programs rather than with the alt-tab behaviour. Most of the time I actually do want to treat all the windows of a single application as a group. But terminal sessions seem different to me - two terminal windows are not related closely to each other just because they are managed by the same application. Perhaps I need to find the setting that stops terminal windows from being grouped together...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com