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Comment by deathanatos | Hacker News Reader

> Who organizes things around application anyway, instead of windows?

macOS. There's no Alt+Tab, for example: no way to switch between two arbitrary windows on the Z-stack¹. The not-equivalent that exists is ⌘+Tab, and it switches apps; the usability of it, vs. Alt+Tab, is horrendous. (It fronts stuff you don't want, covering up stuff you do want.)

There are workspaces … but I have found them hard to get productive with: macOS will reorder keystrokes around workspace changes. That is, the keyboard input "abc ^→ (workspace change) def" is a race condition: typed quickly (within the animation delay), it becomes as if you typed "abcdef ^→".

¹no, ⌘+` does not count.

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> There's no Alt+Tab

There is https://github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos

You can use the up arrow with an application highlighted in the command-tab picker to select a particular window of the application.

Control+F4 switches between arbitrary windows, in most-recently used order.

You can rebind it in settings, though at that point you may as well get the bonus features of 3rd party implementations.

How would a window-based ⌘+Tab even work? It'd be a million miles long and take forever to cycle to the thing you want.

How many windows do you have opened? How many things are you doing at the same time?

Is this because you lose configuration if you close them, or because they take too long to open? Because you can't really use so many of them to make switching not viable on a single virtual desktop.

I tend to have a ton of apps/windows open at any given time due to a combination of tasks often requiring a fairly wide array of apps, but also to reduce the friction of context switching to a minimum (even with a lightning fast SSD, closing one set of apps/documents and opening another takes time). So at any given time I probably have apps/windows open for a few different tasks open.

Virtual desktops get heavy usage from me, but (Cmd|Alt)-Tab switching being caged off per-desktop would actually pose a problem, because when I reach for an app with that shortcut I'm not actively thinking about which desktop it's on — I just want to go to it, wherever it happens to be, even if it's been intentionally placed on a particular virtual desktop.

So app-scoped Cmd-Tab works well for me, because the number of entries it has is always reasonable to tap through and it includes entries from all desktops on both screens.

I have 14 windows open, currently. That's not hugely unreasonable to display in a window switcher … not to mention that every other OS manages it? I've had more, but I mean, how many more are we even talking?

(And if you have a huge number more open, well, how does exposé function?)

And the window switcher on other OSes usually orders the choices by Z-order, which is essentially in recently-used order. The window you want is often only one or two hits away.

(And, if not, the one in MATE in Linux is also navigable by arrow keys or by mouse, so nothing's too far away.)

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