Rectangle user for years, great app. Today I got frustrated enough to find AltTab (https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/), huge improvement to my workflow already.

Sometimes when cmd+tab'ing between apps it'll bring the selected window to the foreground, and sometimes it won't. They'll regain focus for typing, but are hidden behind another window for whatever reason. Fully open windows too, not minimized or anything. Was driving me mad having to click between IntelliJ and Chrome hundreds of times while doing web UI work instead of quick switching with the keyboard.

damn! thanks for the list ill check them out.

Alfred is truly excellent. Not only is it capable of a wide array of things but is built extremely well, being exceptionally lightweight, stable, extensible, and tiny. It’s increasingly rare for software to be even two of those these days, let alone all of them.

Alfred is fantastic since it let me remove all the junk I don't care about in Spotlight. Which makes search ridiculously fast for the only things I ever want to use search for: opening applications and basic OS functions you mentioned like locking, entirely using the keyboard. There's a fantastic Alfred feature of an additional locking shortcut that blacks out the display immediately instead of meandering on the lock screen afterwards.

I have never had any desire on any OS to search the web, or the app store, or even my files for that matter (without doing so deliberately). Having everything mangled together is so distracting to me and only slows me down. Started liking my M1 Macbook Pro so much more after I discovered Alfred while searching for any tricks that would let me pare down Spotlight to essentially nothing.

I debloated my Windows 11 search to do close to the same thing (although not quite as good as Alfred) and remapped search hotkeys to be consistent across both platforms which is just so pleasant as someone who routinely needs to switch between MacOS and Windows.

> I want to lock, restart and shut down my computer with my keyboard. There are some shortcuts but honestly I can never remember the key combinations.

If you don’t already know this combo, cmd-? (AKA cmd-shift-/) will drop down the “help” menu in most applications that run in macOS. From there, I use the arrow keys to move to other menus. It’s just one nearly universal hotkey and it works for almost all menu items.

FYI, you can use the Keyboard preferences page in System Settings to assign things like “lock screen” (I forget exactly what it’s called) to a key (F15 I think I used).

I don’t know if Restart or Shutdown are allowable choices.

lock: ctrl + cmd + Q

logout: cmd + shift + Q

> Alfred

Raycast[1] is the new (and preferred) kid on the block.

[1] https://www.raycast.com/