6 comments to “Bring related windows forward during Alt-Tab”

1. On Monday, February 6th, 2006 at 11:26 pm dynamist wrote:

   FWIW, invoke app-specific Expose then Command-Tab and exactly what you’re describing occurrs, sans what’s hidden/minimized which while I wish there was a way besides clicking the Dock to get to, I think is the right choice, because Expose is for what you have up, otherwise you wouldn’t have hidden or minimized it. Just my two cents. But most of what you’re asking for exists

2. On Tuesday, February 21st, 2006 at 8:14 am karen wrote:

   i just had to write. i am a mac user turned pc user returned mac user and this is my BIGGEST problem with OS X: unlike the pc, there is no one place i can look to see the programs that are running, that have windows hidden in, and that i that i have windows open but behind other things on my screen. i consider myself quite a competent computer user, but i’m constantly “losing” my windows and i’m left feeling, well: dumb.

   this sounds like a dear abby letter.

   on michelangelo’s to do list is an app to help me with this. so my fingers are crossed.

3. On Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006 at 8:19 pm Philip Haine wrote:

   Hi, Karen! I’m curious about this being the biggest problem for a PC -> Mac switcher…

   What about those little black arrows next to or under the dock icons? Do those not suffice for telling you at least which apps are running?

   You can right click (or ctrl-click) on any dock icon to show and get to the windows that are open. Does that help at all?

   Do you ever use Expose? Does that help at all at finding missing windows?

   The thing I can’t stand about the Windows taskbar is how badly it scales. It shows a flat list of the open windows but as soon as it runs out of room, poof, it gets all hierarchical on me. And it, too, is not a unified system with the Alt-Tab behavior of Windows, even though both mechanisms are all about the same thing.

4. On Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006 at 9:28 pm Philip Haine wrote:

   Thanks for the pointer, dynamist! And I thought I knew Expose’s tricks.

   (The amount of hidden functionality in Expose never ceases to amaze me. Like a tree falling in the forest, I wonder about the relevance of such useful but undiscoverable features.)

   I do appreciate that thought was put into integrating Cmd-Tab app switching with Expose window choosing. But I wouldn’t quite say that Expose-plus-Cmd-Tab behavior is the answer to my alt-tabbing dreams. Having to take my right hand off the mouse to invoke Expose with F9, and then use my left hand to do Cmd-Tab, and then wait for the animation finish doing its thing is not the instantaneous, direct response I had in mind.

   And besides, Expose splays out the windows and makes them smaller. This is (usually) a good thing if the task is to locate a window from a pile of open windows. But moving and resizing them tosses out our spatial knowledge of what is where.

   All I want is to bring forward THAT window that was last seen in THAT part of the display, instantly. The proposal is to just let me brainlessly alt-tab until it appears there.

5. On Sunday, July 26th, 2009 at 9:16 am Nick Harris wrote:

   1. Apple’s new keyboards have (F3) be a dedicated Expose key, so you don’t have to move your hand off the mouse to get at (F9) anymore.

   2. You can hack this arrangement yourself by modifying Keyboard Shortcuts in System Preferences, you just have to reassign or disable any collisions (shown by a yellow warning triangle).

   3. The new keyboard isn’t actually hard-wiring (F3) meaning that it is now somehow “lost”, as (FUNCTION)+(F3) gets you your own definition for that key – which could very well be different.

   4. You don’t need to use right click or (CONTROL) click on an Application’s Dock icon to get it’s window list menu to pop-up. Single or “Zero” button mouse users need only left click and hold for the menu to appear.

   What would be nice to see in Snow Leopard 10.6 is some form of ‘Jump Lists’, with all the files created with that Application in a reverse ordered list of most recently viewed starting above a dividing line above those that are currently open on the desktop in windows. This would mean that the most accessible most recent not currently open document would be as near to the Dock as possible, then the next most recently viewed document would be above that one, and so on up the screen.

   I don’t think that people should be scared of tall pop-ups.

   Also, the pop-up could be “infinitely tall” by having it scroll as you reached the top – in the manner of a very long list of Fonts in a DTP application’s menu.

   Feel free to steal these ideas if they have any merit

6. On Sunday, July 26th, 2009 at 11:59 am Philip Haine wrote:

   Nick, thanks for the updates and adding more ideas.

   Expose is being updated in Snow Leopard and I’m hoping that some of these extremely frequent task switching operations will be substantially refined.

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