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Comment by fiddlerwoaroof | Hacker News Reader

The command-tab switcher has a lot of hidden functionality:

I always only use cmd-tab to open the switcher, then I use arrow keys to pick an application, up/down arrows to view an application’s windows (arrow keys and enter to select a specific one)

You can also hit Q to quit an application from the switcher and probably more things I’m currently forgetting.

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Wait... What? That application-window trick is awesome. How have I been using been using Macs for twenty+ years and never found that? Discoverability = not-awesome.

As repetitive as these top-tips threads can be, we need one every now and again. Someone's guaranteed to learn something from them, and I'm grateful it was my turn today.

I have mixed feelings about discoverability. I'd usually rather functionality be available in a non-discoverable fashion than unavailable because designers couldn't figure out how to surface it in the UI. And, one of the things I like about vim and emacs is the interface can be extremely minimal with all the functionality I need behind key shortcuts and the like. (Although, emacs has a nice solution of `C-x C-b` list all the available shortcuts for the current window and `M-x` listing all the available commands.

The way I learned these shortcuts was reading macOS's help back in 2007, but the quality of documentation bundled with macOS has gone downhill quite a bit.

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