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Comment by stemlord | Hacker News Reader

I like always visible top tabs but personally ctrl+tab has always been bs. Hitting it 10 times then ctrl+shift+tab once more because I miscalculated has never been faster than using the mouse

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Enable the Most Recently Used ordering. That way you won't have to press Ctrl+Tab more than once or twice, because most of the time you don't need to tabs at the back of the stack. Imagine if the Alt+Tab switcher worked like most browsers—it would be pretty useless.

This is not an option in Chrome, for some unexplicable reason (Chrome has marked it as wontfix)., and it's the main reason I use Firefox. It's possible to hack around it with extensions and opening the Chrome extensions settings XML file and manually setting the Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab shortcuts, but it's fragile and annoying to set up, and has some odd behaviours in certain circumstances.

It's a bit weird at first, but think the Chrome extension "Most Recent Used Tab Stack" works ok. It keeps the tabs sorted by moving the current tab to the left. That being said, I also prefer Firefox -- mainly because of its container extensions.

I have always hated the orders you describe. Means you need to mentally keep track of how long since you used each tab, and there is no deterministic way of getting to a specific tab other than slowly tabbing until you randomly arrive there.

Do you feel the same way about Alt+Tab window switching?

There is a deterministic way: look at the pop-up that shows the thumbnail in the most-recently used (MRU) order. Just like Alt+Tab.

If you're tabbing through more than five tabs, it's probably faster to click, whichever method is used. But at least MRU ordering lets you easily switch between any two or three tabs. That is impossible with visual ordering.

I think people usually have wayyyy more tabs opened than programs. I might have 5-6 programs so alt tab doesn't take long to circle through. I might have 20 tabs that I'm currently using, and it is not unusual to go above that (and I know many people having 50 or more). In that case it is very slow to go through them.

If a keyboard kept re-arranging itself according to which key was most recently pressed, you'd be typing a hundred times slower than if it doesn't.

Taking in visual information is super slow. I feel like a lot of interface designers don't get this. It's great that it's there as a training wheel to teach you the movements, but having to rely on it even as an experienced user is a constant source of frustration.

> Do you feel the same way about Alt+Tab window switching?

It's a good question. It seems to work better for window switching because I'm switching more frequently and in a more predictable pattern. It's usually between 2 windows (code window and browser window) or occasionally 3 (code, browser, documentation/reference material).

Whereas it's rare to be switching in a consistent pattern between any 2 code windows. If a situation like that does emerge, I rearrange them so the two I need are side by side.

Switching from Chrome the most annoying thing in FF was lack of tab switching with Ctrl+<number>. Fortunately there are extensions providing that. Works great for 5-6 tabs, especially when it gets into muscle memory (not sure if that's correct term in this case but what I mean is that brain "knows" that ctrl+1 will be X and Ctrl+3 will be Y and can switch between tabs without thinking of their actual numbers)

It's ALT+N

And if you're a tab-hoarder,

   alt+1
   ctrl+shift+tab

Goes to the rightmost tab

alt-9 goes to the rightmost tab, as well.

I'll be damned. Best thing about being wrong on the internet, somebody's always happy to help!

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