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Comment by nonrecursive | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry that happened to you, Ensorceled, and I hope you didn't lose any work.

The way it's supposed to work is, if you click on a horizontal row then it opens all the apps in that row (if they're not already open) and closes any apps that aren't in that row. So, for example, Terminal was closed because it sounds like it wasn't in your app group.

About "unsafely" - it should behave just as if you had hit command+q in the app. So if you have unsaved documents, the application should prompt you to save them.

Sorry again for the frustration it caused you!

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The terminal close didn't work this way, normally it won't quit if there are processes in the windows. With Foreman it just closed up.

I was kind of surprised at the behaviour, mostly because of the superlatives ... fast app switching doesn't imply opening and closing to me since some apps are VERY slow to start up (excel, numbers, xcode, eclipse, )

You should make sure you are very clear about it CLOSING apps.

Also, the first time you should not close apps but instead ask the user if closing all the non-listed apps is ok. So the first time they run it the are not surprised by everything going away. Especially losing all my Chrome tabs :-(

You need a "stop list" so that apps in the list are not shutdown.

This is all very helpful feedback, and I really appreciate it. I've put your suggestions in my todo list. Thank you!

Might I suggest different utilizing desktop management? A mode where application aren't closed as aggressively just opened in a fresh new desktop? This allows the user to abstract away the other programs and focus on those in the new desktop window.

Other suggestions include - hotkeys - spotlight / alfred integration - Adding macros to launch when click a new set of apps

For the record, I totally got what is supposed to happen. I wonder if you should have a list of apps that can be configured to be ignored. For instance, I always have emacs open and would never want it closed (even for gaming configurations). I would rather say that once than for every configuration I have.

This is the next item on my todo list :)

One thing that might help is to have an option for Foreman to only manage the apps that are in at least one app group.

In other words, if I don't put terminal into an app group, it doesn't get closed, etc.

I'd be nice if you could just _hide_ apps not in the group, not kill them... But I guess that would mean they still show up in command-tab.

It sounds like you're forcefully killing processes - can you at least kill them more gracefully? Basically "kill" vs "kill -9".

I wonder if there is a way to programmatically hide apps from the cmd-tab switcher? I know some apps (e.g. apps that have a system-wide menu) let you hide its open status from the dock (which in turn hides it from the app switcher); Can you show app icons in the dock and not in the cmd-tab switcher? I'd like to be able to access certain apps through the dock but don't want them cluttering up my precious cmd-tab.

Here's the method being called: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/AppKi...

From the docs, "attempts to quit the receiver normally." I'm not sure why ensorcled's terminal was closed while a process was running, but I get prompted to confirm closing terminal when a process is running.

Nah, some of it's my fault for not reading closer. I didn't lose data, only time.

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