Comment by sceptic123
1 day ago
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.
1 day ago
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.
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.