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Comment by femngi | Hacker News Reader

They fixed Alt-Tab when I had never before realised it was broken. The new paradigm just makes so much more sense: Alt-Tab switches between applications and Alt-` switches between individual windows of that application.

When I have to use a desktop without this functionality I am now painfully aware of how cumbersome and slow the old behaviour was when I have plenty of windows open.

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Listen, I don't know what you're using your computer for, but I have five terminal windows open. One of them is IRC, one of them is reorganizing my videos, and one of them is running mtr so that when I notice a network problem I can see how long it's been going on and where it is. These windows have nothing to do with each other. It is not beneficial for the mtr window to be lumped in with the IRC window. If I'm switching back and forth between IRC, reorganizing my videos, and my browser, I do not want to deal with mtr. I do not want to deal with the window where I was running the compiler yesterday. I am not interested in the fact that the window where I'm reading a man page is "one application", the window where I'm reading Server Fault is "another application", and the window where I'm looking at a PDF about LVM is "a third application"; I'm interested in what I'm trying to get done, not what program happens to have opened the window that I'm doing it in. If I'm switching back and forth between the LVM PDF and the pvs man page and the shell window where I'm actually running LVM commands, I do not want to have to deal with the other fifteen unrelated terminal windows I may have open. I don't want to have to think about which kind of windows I'm switching between every time I switch windows, especially on this ten-inch netbook, where I run everything fullscreen.

In short, for the way I use my computer, the Alt-`/Alt-Tab dichotomy doesn't make sense. It turns what used to be a zero-effort action — switch back to the previous window — into an error-prone action that is likely to take me to something unrelated to what I'm trying to do. And now it's a zero-effort action again, since I stopped trying to use GNOME or Unity.

How do you use your computer that this makes sense to you? I don't mean to imply that you're insane, since I recognize that people do not all use their computers the same way, but I can't imagine how you're using your computer that enforcing this dichotomy is actually helpful to you.

(Note: I do use tabbed browsing, because, sad to say, Firefox still takes five seconds to open a new window. That's seven billion clock cycles, one clock cycle for every man, woman, and child alive today.)

For what it's worth. Gnome is designed to make this choice easy for you. https://extensions.gnome.org/ hosts a large number of javascript extensions which change the functionality of the desktop.

Fixing alt-tab is one of the first things I do.

Oh, thanks for that! I don't use unity -- I'm too prone to RSI to really use anything with a mouse -- and I'm too stingy on my screen estate (I run xmonad). But either way it's nice to be aware that there are extentions... the result page(s!) for alt tab was both encouraging and a little scary...

This is the one I prefer: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/15/alternatetab/

It correctly switches and changes order based on your alt+tab history, and it splits alternate workspaces up into an end section which switches workspace for you, so 'shift + alt + tab' becomes 'go to the last app on another workspace i used'. Very nice.

I do the same on my netbook, but use urxvt for a tabbed terminal. That lets me use shift + left/right to move between tabs, ctrl+left/right to shift tab ordering, and ctlr+d to close one.

So that's one desktop pane, then one for chrome, one for emacs, and one for pgadmin. I also make very liberal use of fluxbox's 'sticky' button for dragging a terminal between desktop switches.

7 billion clicks - that's within the ethos of the Mozilla Foundation surely? Even distribution of wealth. Sounds like a grand manifesto.

I would use workspaces for that.

I'd just like to point out that using ` for your user interface seems a recipe for problems, as that key jumps all over in different keyboard layouts. In fact, both in Spanish and German layouts it is close to the backspace key, but in different positions.

One would hope the different keymaps/locales help with mapping that to "alt-tab"/"alt-key_over_tab"?

Hate to say that, but thats exactly the way OS X works for ages.

Yes it is, more or less. This functionality is badly broken (by default) for international users. As the poster above you said, the ` key changes place in different keyboard layouts.

I'm using a ISO/Spanish layout and the day I discovered that Cmd+` hotkey I just couldn't figure out why the hell that key would be mapped to "switch between windows of the same app". After googling for a while, I found out what the ANSI/US keyboard layout is, and only then the hotkey made sense. Just for reference the backtick key is right next to the "P" letter in the ISO/ES layout.

Now the first thing I do when sitting in front of an OSX computer is to remap that hotkey to Cmd+º, which is the same physical key in ISO/ES than ` in ANSI/US. I seriously doubt that most international OSX users know about this hotkey though. I have a few (non-techie) friends using OSX now, and none of them knew about it...

Wow, I would've thought at least OS X mapped that to "key over tab" rather than literally alt-`... (Which is the key left of backspace with the shift modifier on a Norwegian layout...).

Incidentally, I've several times considered modifying that when writing shell scripts ... on the other hand, it does make one try to use the $(...) over `...` as much as possible, which when it makes sense, makes for easier/safer handling of backspaces etc ... so not every inconvenience is a disadvantage...

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