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Comment by sceptic123 | Hacker News Reader

Whatever fits your mental model I suppose, but every window is accessible via keyboard shortcuts on the Mac too, it just needs a different approach.

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Do you know if there is a way to quickly switch between only two individual windows in different applications? A very common paradigm for me is swapping between two windows, for example a terminal session for code editing and a browser window for reference. On Windows and most Linux WMs, this is just a quick alt-tab hit to toggle between the two most recently focused windows. As I know there is no way to do this on macOS without bringing _all_ the windows to the foreground, which is not what I want. This is my #1 complaint about macos, I'd be so happy if there is just some shortcut I'm missing to accomplish this.

I'm pretty sure that's part of what stage manager is for — you can drag windows in the same stage and they operate how you want — but there's too much manual setup required for me to realistically suggest it as an alternative.

There are a bunch of third party tools you can use though, [AltTab](1) is free and tries to replicate windows experience on Mac. [Raycast](2) has a Switch Windows command which also allows direct access to any window via the keyboard (bind to alt+tab if you like) amongst many other features.

[1] https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/ [2] https://www.raycast.com/

Yeah unfortunately my work doesn't allow 3rd party apps like that (a reasonable restriction, IMO).

Control+F4 - ‘move focus to the active or next window’ is essentially that. (With the caveat that if your keyboard focus winds up on the menu bar or otherwise not on a window at all, control+f4 shifts focus back to the window, rather than switching windows. The main way to make that happen is with the other control-f-key shortcuts that no-one uses, though)

If you’re going to use it I’d probably rebind it in the keyboard shortcuts settings.

Doesn't seem to work for me, it looks like it cycles through all open windows instead of the most recently active window.

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