Hacker News Reader

Comment by frosted-flakes | Hacker News Reader

But why are windows grouped by application to begin with? When I used Macos I could never get used to the way it treated windows, and it is primarily the reason I use Windows today. But now Windows 11 is forcing grouping taskbar buttons by application (ungrouping was always an option before), and I don't know why.

View on HN

I think it mostly derives from the fact that macOS has a far more cohesive concept of "application" than Windows does. A Mac app's files are managed as a group (the app bundle), execution is managed at the app level (traditionally, closing the last window did not quit the application), window visibility can be managed at the app level (show/hide as an alternative to minimizing). So cycling through apps is a very natural thing to include as well, and once that shortcut exists it makes a bit more sense to have a second shortcut to cycle within an app's windows than through all visible windows. Especially once Apple introduced Exposé/Mission Control, there really wasn't much need for a shortcut to cycle through the full list of windows, because there are plenty of other ways to select the window you want in fewer steps.

I might be missing something, but how do you efficiently switch apps in expose?

What I meant was that Exposé pretty much provided the missing purely window-oriented switching interface to complement the app-oriented interfaces that already existed. So once Exposé/Mission Control existed, there was even less need for a Windows-style Alt-Tab equivalent shortcut.

Don’t forget the Dock that represents all the running applications.

Which sucks if you like me want to keep virtual spaces (or desktops) separated. I only want to see windows (or apps) running on the current desktop in the dock, which kind of breaks that (apple app) model i suppose. This is doable in windows (and a few DEs in linux) but not in Mac OS unfortunately.

Back in the earlier days of classic Mac OS you would only see the windows of one application at a time. I think it's a leftover of that philosophy.

It appears you can still tell Windows 11 not to group buttons through a registry key:

  [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
  "NoTaskGrouping"=dword:00000001

Source: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/issues/9

That's only if you've patched in the old Windows 10 taskbar into Windows 11. Which I don't want to do for various reasons.

Wow, i didn't know that Window 11 is forcing grouping of windows. This is pretty my biggest problem with Mac OS which is why i always stayed with Windows. No reason to do so any more i guess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com