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Comment by lmg643 | Hacker News Reader

>It always amused me how Apple is capable of producing so quality hardware and has so bright ideas in design, but makes so awful lot of questionable decisions in software.

Amen. I recently migrated to iMac/Mavericks from Windows 7 and there are a number of really useful things you can do in Windows 7 that there aren't good analogues for in Mavericks. Task-switching, for example, leaves a lot to be desired. Apparently a third party application, Witch, can fix that - wonderful (and not really a good fix if you are using windows virtual machines side-by-side). Launchpad is horribly designed, has phantom stuff on there and you can't delete them directly. I still like the machine but it's funny to think that windows had the edge in a number of usability areas.

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Window switching is something there's really little to complain about on OSX. You've got sloppy window focus (scroll on a window that's not active), mission control for switching and finding applications, an intelligently organised alt-tab application switcher, multiple desktops with pinning if necessary, and the Dock for even faster switching. What do you think is missing?

I suspect the problem he's dealing with coming from windows is that the Mac OS paradigm is application switching via the dock and Command+Tab whereas in Windows the taskbar and Alt+Tab are window switching.

In which case alt + ` would be a suitable replacement, as that's the command for window switching.

'Command' + '~' switches windows in the current app.

For Windows style window switching (across all applications), use Control + F4.

You may also need to hold down the function key if you have your keyboard setup the default way, where things like brightness, volume, etc. are the primary uses of the function keys.

It's worth noting that you can remap the key easily from the Keyboard panel in System Preferences. Look under Shortcuts -> Keyboard for "Movie focus to active or next window".

Command + ` only works within the app once you've switched. You may only want to switch to one window from an application but Command+Tabbing to it brings all windows from that application on top.

It takes some getting used to.

Appreciate the sympathy. I'm used to minimizing applications to get them out of the way, and alt-tab on windows restores the window you want. on the mac, it only restores a non-minimized window, and command+~ only works if both windows are not minimized. Mission control also doesn't restore minimized windows. Windows Snapping was also a cool feature that isn't native to OSX, you need a third party tool - great to do a side-by-side on spreadsheet/document.

And can we get a comment about launchpad? and widgets? considering how good the iOS experience is, the desktop launchpad is horrible. and widgets should be removed, rethought or integrated for sure. both of these strike me as afterthoughts, which is bizarre considering how central they appear when you first set up the OS.

Get used to not minimising things, it's not the flow you should be using on OSX for maximum efficiency.

Widgets are antiquated and just there for legacy reasons.

> I'm used to minimizing applications to get them out of the way, and alt-tab on windows restores the window you want.

Use Hide (Cmd-H).

I use spotlight exclusively to launch applications. Launchpad I used exactly once before unpinning it from the dock.

OS X widgets turned out about as well as every other attempt to make desktop widgets. Banishing them to their own virtual desktop solves the problem of it being impossible to use them due to that there's always windows in the way, but it doesn't solve the problem that apparently no one actually has any ideas for desktop widgets that are more than mildly useful.

Launchpad is good for reviewing what you have installed. Every once in a while I'll go through it and find crap. Forgot about.

While I'd definitely suggest using hide instead of minimize, there is a way to unminimize windows from the application switcher (Command+Tab), it's just totally unintuitive. Here's what you do:

1. Minimize a window (Command+M). 2. Switch applications (Command+Tab). 3. Switch back to the application with the minimized window (Command+Tab). Before you release the Command key, hold down the Option key. Now release the command key.

Voila--your minimized window will return from the dock.

I am a recent mac convert and and the CMD + tab + Option is nothing but frustratingly finger bending. I really wish there is some way to bring the minimized windows to their maximized state when I command tab them.

For at least some applications, like Firefox, Command + ' rotates through application windows; important distinction. You can't just flip between two windows that way if you have three application windows open, you'll end up rotating through that third window.

But, doesn't mission control let you switch windows of an app globally? It's the only window switcher I use (swipe up on Magic Trackpad)

I really want something like Cmd+Tab, except one that lists all windows on current desktop (doesn't include minimized windows or other desktops).

When comparing two things on one small screen, I want to be able to rapidly switch between two windows. Depending on if it's within same app, I have to think to use either Cmd+Tab or Cmd+`. And all the minimized apps, as well as apps on other desktops get in the way.

Mission Control is unacceptable for rapid window switching because it requires me to move the mouse pointer and find the other window, when all I want to do is "select previous window".

I have the same gripe. Think about giving Switch (https://github.com/numist/Switch) a try. Cmd+Tab still functions as normal, but Opt+Tab (you can change the default keybinding) will allow you to cycle through all available windows on a single desktop.

Not a perfect solution, but it's a big improvement imo over Cmd+`.

Thank you for that recommendation. I'm giving it a try, so far it looks like it might be an invaluable tool!

you might want to try out http://contextsformac.com/ i think it's a little better than switch, though not free.

From a comment below, Control+F4 seems to do the trick. You could remap that to your Cmd+Tab.

That seems to be VERY close to _exactly_ what I'm looking for, but it's not quite right (which makes it very far from useful, unfortunately).

The problem is that pressing Ctrl+F4 twice in a row keeps iterating over the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. windows. So if you want to switch between two most recently windows, you have to press Ctrl+F4, then Ctrl+Shift+F4, then Ctrl+F4, then Ctrl+Shift+F4, etc.

Mac OS X apparently does not have focus follows mouse:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.it/2008/04/settling-osx-focus-fo...

That's kind of old though. Have they fixed it? I doubt it's a priority.

It does, in a 'lazy' way. e.g. You can scroll an unfocused window when you're mose is over it.

This is actually one of the few things in OS X that drive me nuts. It's tremendously useful, but because there's little visual distinction between a focused and unfocused window, I'll start typing in a window I've just been scrolling and realize I'm issuing random commands to Mail.app on my other monitor.

Mavericks' blessed addition of per-screen menu bars has the nice side effect of making this a little more noticeable: The menu bar is transparent on a screen without the active window. Terminal.app also can be customized to make inactive windows partially transparent. I wish that option were system-wide.

Well, that's crippled sloppy focus as you can only scroll the background windows, but NOT type on them. Terminal.app has some sloppy focus support, but only between its own windows which makes the whole experience a pain.

A.k.a. sane sloppy focus? I think I'd find it very confusing if my mouse position (which is effectively arbitrary when I'm not mousing) affected where my typing was going to appear.

I guess this depends on habit: once used to "real" sloppy focus, it is really difficult to live without it. At the same time, I've seen tons of people get confused when using my computer and accidentally moving the mouse. Still, worth a try if you haven't (and kind of impossible with OSX).

It's a mess, that's what the problem is. Just look at this thread and the number of ways that sometimes work in certain cases to do basic operations. Some of this is the added complexity of additional desktops (which I agree are awesome and sorely missing in Windows), but some, like switching windows in the same app, are a usability disaster. Here's a short list from this thread for something which is universally ctrl+tab (and shift+ctrl+tab for the other direction) in Windows:

- Mission Control

- cmd+tab

- cmd+`

- ctrl+f4

- Switch, a tool which enables Opt+tab

- contextsformac

- cmd+~ (only in some cases)

I'm confused how this is a problem for you. Pick the one(s) you find helpful, and ignore the rest?

Because they don't all work the same and they don't all work all the time. It's not like they're just different aliases for the same action. Some work in certain cases with a certain app, some work in special contexts, some don't work unless you install an app an remap your keyboard. It's kind of insane.

Cmd+~ is the same as Cmd+`, just with shift pressed down. Doesn't make sense to list both of them (since you don't also list Cmd+Shift+Tab).

The killer feature that I dearly miss in OS X is decent Window management.

In Windows, I can use Win+left/right keys to make a window take up precisely half of the screen. I can press Win+up_arrow to fullscreen a window.

On Linux, I can use tiling window managers like Dwm or Xmonad to fullfil all my tiling needs.

In OS X, I can full screen or have to manually deal with each and every window. It's awful.

Sizeup: http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/

Apart from resizing/moving windows, one feature I miss dearly from my Linux desktop is the ability to move windows from one desktop to the other. I use keyboard maestro to resize windows, and the developer mentions somewhere in his website that there's no way to move windows from one desktop to the other with OS X. Does anybody know if that's the case?

you can grab a window with your mouse (left click) on its upper panel hold it, so that you can drag it around your desktop. To drag it to the next desktop just hold it + CTRL+1 or 2,3,4 (depending on your set desktops).

Ah, missed the most important bit in my comment: I could do this in Linux without the mouse, which is the behavior I want to replicate in OS X if possible.

Thanks for your answer.

There's quite a few window managers available for OS X (divvy, sizeup, shifit to name but a few).

Take a look at ShiftIt, it allows you to use keyboard commands to easily resize windows!

Wow, I got way more responses to this than I thought I would. As well, this solves my problem!

Once again the old internet wisdom of "you can only get help by disguising your question as whining" is proved true: http://bash.org/?152037

We're on Hacker News, so https://github.com/jigish/slate Ultimate solution.

We're on Hacker News, so https://github.com/lunixbochs/reslate Ultimate solution.

FTFY.

You can use Slate to get exactly that: https://github.com/jigish/slate

There's also BetterTouchTool[1], which also has the drag-window-to-side-of-screen-half-maximize behaviour from Windows.

[1]: http://www.boastr.net/

I've tried all the solutions mentioned and I settled on Spactacle in the end, because it's lightweight and open source.

http://spectacleapp.com/

Other (FLOSS) options:

* ShiftIt: https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt

* Spectacle: https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle

As usual in OS X, glaring deficiencies in basic functionality of the base OS are dealt with via a vast ecosystem of third party software. I'd probably estimate that somewhere between 1/5th to 1/3rd of available third party OS X software is software designed to fix basic problems with the OS as shipped (or with the apps that ship along with the OS).

yep. this is my problem is osx. if i complain about something in it, the reply is always "just install (some app)," but that's exactly what i do not want to do. i want the os itself to just... be better and work like its competition has for a long time.

I'm probably a bit weird, but all the computers I own now are macs... and I run windows 90% of the time on pretty much all of them. OSX really is pretty, and I like having a unix with a nice GUI, but when it comes to usability I think OSX just isn't very good. Task switching is awkward. The dock looks nice, but compared to the taskbar it's not very functional. Maximizing windows often ends up with surprising results. (Does it take up the full screen? Or does it just vertically maximize? What happens if I try to unmaximize?) Useful keyboard keys are mapped to weird things (for instance: home/end moving to the beginning/end of a document instead of the end of a line. I need to go to the end of a line about 100x more often than I need to go to the end of a document).

Also: animations. They're great for demos, but when you're trying to get serious work done they're irritating and you can't turn them off without some commandline-fu. I get the impression apple pretty much will always prioritize gloss over functionality.

Am I missing something or is the F3 button in Mavericks not a good switching experience?

I do agree with your Launchpad comment and just drag Application folder into the right side of the Dock (settings Sort by Name, Display as Folder, View Contents as List) along with Utilities, Documents, and Downloads (Sort by Date Added).

Why use Launchpad or any kind of mouse picking for Applications/Utilities? You already know what you want to launch, and a letter or two typed in to Spotlight will get it.

Alternatively: Alfred - a fantastic app not just for quickly launching apps and furthermore very customizable with user-defined actions.

It's been a long time since I used a mouse to launch an app.

Spotlight is slow and often doesn't find the right things. Quicksilver and Alfred do a much better job.

I haven't found that to be the case for app launching, and I've used Quicksilver and LaunchBar fairly extensively in the past.

F3 is Mission Control, F4 is Launchpad (and I don't use Launchpad). I thought the op was about switching not launching.

Launchpad works great with the keyboard too.

Using Hot Corners, I have Mission Control (ie. app switching) activated at bottom right, and Application Windows (i.e. window switching) activated at top right, plus Desktop at bottom left. I find this makes any kind of switching extremely fast and fluid.

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