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Comment by lwouis | Hacker News Reader

Hi OP,

I'm the author of AltTab (https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/), a popular window switcher for macOS, imitating Windows famous alt+tab shortcut. I know for a fact how hard it is to implement what you did. It looks very nice, well done!

I see you ran into the issue of not being able to detect windows from other Spaces. Apple introduced it in macOS 12.2. If you're curious, you can see the vast efforts we've deployed trying to find a workaround: https://github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos/issues/1324. I wish some retro-engineering genius would solve this. We haven't been lucky so far. Of course Apple could fix this all in an instant with a new API, but that's very unlikely to happen.

Thank you

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I am an occasional alt tab user and it is a great product. Thanks for building it. I am reasonably used to MacOS window management behavior but I still need something like alt tab once a while, that’s why it keeps running in the background.

I also really appreciate the partnership and open attitude your comment above demonstrates, and that to a potential‘competitor’.

Are you familiar with the change Apple made to app stack ordering where cmd+h no longer deprioritizes the window resulting in the wonderful cmd+h cmd+tab agghhhhhh cmd+h cmd+tab cmd+tab rage fest I haven't been able to stop inflicting upon myself every three seconds for years? I have yet to find a third-party app that fixes this. :)

This is what I don't understand. Ok apple does not care or does not want to spend resources on the window management mess of MacOS for whatever reason (iOS is more important, MacOS does not bring services revenue etc)

Just open the API for the 3rd party developers to fix your mess!

> open the API for the 3rd party developers

Coincidentally, after 10 years, and 100 releases of 0.9, HammerSpoon just released 1.0 in August 2024:

Hammerspoon is a bridge between the operating system and a Lua scripting engine. What gives Hammerspoon its power is a set of extensions that expose specific pieces of system functionality, to the user.

You can write Lua code that interacts with macOS APIs for applications, windows, mouse pointers, filesystem objects, audio devices, batteries, screens, low-level keyboard/mouse events, clipboards, location services, wifi, and more.

http://www.hammerspoon.org/

This is awesome, but still requires that apple gets their act together and expose/document their private objective c apis