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Comment by tomrod | Hacker News Reader

I too find Unity unwieldy. I discovered alt+~ yesterday, which allows switching among local file windows--that was a huge slowdown for me!

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I like Unity quite a lot and find it very attractive, same for the most commonly used apps. GNOME Terminal looks great with dimmed transparency, Firefox looks the same as everywhere else but integrates with Unity nicely, Rhytmbox is OK, and all the other GNOME apps -- gPodder, gedit, nautilus -- while not stunning, look fairly modern and, most importantly, don't get in the way too much.

> I discovered alt+~ yesterday

Press and hold Super (Windows) key for a list of most useful Unity keyboard shortcuts. Even that list is pretty!

I think that's the problem I have. I don't care about a pretty desktop, I care more about functionality. Ingrained muscle memory is hard to change -- if alt+tab was the standard for 15 years, why should it be shifted? Similar little issues plague my Unity usage, not even to mention the lack of default configurability. If I want the right side or bottom of my screen to be the dock, it should be so. Instead I'm stuck with having the left side of my right screen being where I make an attempt to find the dock. Unacceptable, in my view.

Shifting paradigms require buy-in, and Unity just doesn't have it from me yet.

> if alt+tab was the standard for 15 years, why should it be shifted?

Alt+tab works as expected -- which is to say, as I always expected it to -- on Unity, what do you mean by "shifted"?

Before Unity, iirc, alt+tab default behavior switched between windows, regardless of program groupings (e.g. Thunderbird compose message and main windows).

I just wanted to say that I appreciate you acknowledging the need to buy-in and being almost completely unjudgemental of things that are preferences. I think your condemnation of Unity's configurability is pretty spot on, though I'm not sure how much of that is deficit vs intentional.

For what it's worth, Apple's been grouping windows by application, GNOME now does it, elementary OS does it, Android/iOS/WP7 arguably do it. Honestly, Windows and KDE(?} are the only modern DE that don't do it. I'm not saying that makes it de-facto right or that you must accept it at all though.

Also, I know in GNOME at least you can configure it. I only say because if that's a big issue stopping you from like Gnome-shell or unity, you might check it out. I know I was blown away at: one, how offensive the Amazon results were in Unity and two, once that was remove, how really, really, really good they've managed to get Unity to me. Compiz will never not be crashy for me... we just have too much history... but Unity itself, I was pretty surprised. Polish (not the people) helps, a lot.

> For what it's worth, Apple's been grouping windows by application, GNOME now does it, elementary OS does it, Android/iOS/WP7 arguably do it. Honestly, Windows and KDE(?} are the only modern DE that don't do it. I'm not saying that makes it de-facto right or that you must accept it at all though.

Fair enough. For now I run OpenBox with Tint2. It's quite minimal, but it does everything I need for a GUI at present. My poor wife on our home computer though... :D She's pretty techie but still Unity is a hard sell for her.

Perhaps Ubuntu could have a "Developer's Build" that includes Unity and other goodies as default, and a "Consumer Build" that defaults to Gnome Classic with many configurability options. Just throwing that out there.

iirc, OSX behaves in the exact same way as Ubuntu. Alt-Tab, to switch between applications, and Alt-something to switch between windows of an application. I could be wrong though, it's been over a year since I used OSX now...

This is where Alt+Tab in Ubuntu/Gnome was just fine before and the new OSX emulation has ruined it for me. I've switched to XFCE.

Hmm, maybe the reason I like Unity is because my previous machine was a Mac and everything just makes sense. I guess if you're coming from Windows, you're going to get annoyed with certain things, but only the same things you'd get annoyed with if you were moving to OSX.

I couldn't stand Unity either, and for me it was more an issue of coming from an earlier version of Ubuntu (gnome).

Fair enough. I miss my CompizFusion window switchers too (as the default).

Are you serious? If that's true I owe you a huge "Thank You!"

Every time I have to put my hands on a friend's Mac (to show/help/diagnose something) the single most frustrating issue is trying to alt-tab between multiple windows within an application (mostly browsers). I do it, and instead it goes to another application.

I have asked every single one of them for such a hotkey get blank stares, and reluctantly use mouse instead. All of my Google-Fu never helped much either.

While we're on the topic, is there a hotkey to toggle maximize/restore of a window in OS X? I was impressed with the way Windows 7 handled it, so much so that I've emulated it in all of my various Linux configurations.

Command + ` will cycle through an applications windows in OS X.

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