7 ms·

I'm not a mac user (but a linux user who chooses desktops with the windowing paradigms of like windows 2000 or so plus multiple desktops) so have no idea how it

• rictic 5y ago
  Desktop PWAs and "open as own window" shortcuts help a lot with this, letting you (from a UI perspective at least) run a web app as though it was its own application rather than within the browser.
  • fomine3 5y ago
    "Create shortcut" is heavily underrated feature on Chromium. Firefox dropped similar feature. https://support.google.com/chrome_webstore/answer/3060053 https://support.google.com/chrome_webstore/answer/3060053
• nneonneo 5y ago
  Cmd+` switches between windows of the same app, and it's actually more convenient (IMHO) than using Alt+Tab to switch between every one of your windows from every app. There are also a handful of trackpad gestures for showing all the windows in the current app or all of your windows.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
    • nneonneo 5y ago
      Yeah. It might be different on a non-US keyboard layout, though. It switches between windows of the current app, so it will only do anything if you have more than one window open in the current app.
  • dvngnt_ 5y ago
    except windows is still king because the preview shows the instance instead of an application
    • boardwaalk 5y ago
      Cmd tilde instantly switches between windows, so there is no preview and so your comment doesn’t really make sense. If you’re talking about cmd-tab, personally I’ll take big recognizable icons than thumbnails with minuscule text and such any day. And mission control will give you windows previews if you want them.
    • dsego 5y ago
      ctrl+up / ctrl+down
      • touristtam 5y ago
        Ctrl+Down is useful for navigating intra application, but Ctrl+Up is a ridiculous mess.
  • pcthrowaway 5y ago
    As long as you haven't made the active window full screen, or the window you want to switch to, then yes, it works. But it is painful :P
    • edanm 5y ago
      That's one of the reasons I never make windows full-screen. Except for that annoying quirk, I actually find the interface better (though it definitely took time to get used to it).
      • FranksTV 5y ago
        I prefer windows to be full screen. Then I three-finger swipe between apps on my trackpad.
        • edanm 5y ago
          I get that. I just use an app that lets me maximize windows with a shortcut (I use Size-up but there are many great options). I then make sure to maximize everything, so effectively all my windows are always maximized. It's not the same as fullscreen, because it still has the top mac bar, but that's fine, and it gives me the ability to cmd+tab / cmd+tilde through my windows.
    • faller 5y ago
      > As long as you haven't made the active window full screen, or the window you want to switch to, then yes, it works. But it is painful :P What's being described as "full screen" windows on macOS is not exactly that, and it's very different than full screen windows on Windows or the standard Linux window managers. On macOS, when we click on the little green button on top of a window, that window becomes full screen *and* becomes a new single-window workspace. https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/use-apps-in-full-screen-mchl9c21d2be/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/use-apps-in-full-sc...
      • rwc 5y ago
        You can "Maximize" the app (to put it in Windows parlance) by Option+Click the green button (you can observe during the hover state for the green button the change from "full screen" to "maximize" by pressing Option).
  • dsego 5y ago
    Not only trackpad, you can use ctrl+down to show all windows of the current app and ctrl+up to see all windows.
  • neoneye2 5y ago
    I prefer binding "Move focus to next window" to the F12 key. Since Cmd+` is a hard keyboard combo on non-american keyboards.
    • pdpi 5y ago
      I kind of gave up on non-US keyboards. The Portuguese layout sucks horribly for programming, especially on the Mac (brackets in horrible places), and the U.K. layout (where I’m based) sucks horribly for writing Portuguese in. The US international just works for all my purposes (including writing tiny amounts of other languages besides Portuguese and English)
      • BlueTemplar 5y ago
        Have you tried this one ? http://norme-azerty.fr/en/ http://norme-azerty.fr/en/
        • rodelrod 5y ago
          That looks like an "AZERTY International", with no advantage over the Portuguese layout for programming, and no advantage over "US International" for typing languages other than French. It does look like an improvement over traditional AZERTY! My choice is "US International with AltGr deadkeys". The deadkey behaviour in simple "US International" is very annoying for programming: you have to double-tap every key that could be an accent, such as single quotes or backquotes.
          • BlueTemplar 5y ago
            > no advantage over "US International" for typing languages other than French Uh, did you not even bother to click on the link or something ?? The easy access to all Greek characters (and more math symbols) alone is great if you work in a math-related field !
            • rodelrod 5y ago
  • iso1210 5y ago
    It's inconsistent compared with alt-tab behaviour. cmd-tab switches to the last used application (assuming you don't hold down), right now for me that switches from Firefox to Slack. Pressing cmd-tab again switches from Slack back to Firefox. However for window switches cmd-` switches from my HN window to a jira window. cmd-` again switches to a webmail window. To switch from jira back to HN I have to press cmd-shift-`
    • fauigerzigerk 5y ago
      Exactly, and believe it or not, this strange little inconsistency is the only thing I still can't get used to after using macOS for ~15 years.
    • danaris 5y ago
      If you press Cmd-Tab, then let go, and press Cmd-Tab again, yes, you get back to the first application you were in. If you press Cmd-Tab, hold Cmd, and keep hitting Tab, you cycle through the available applications. If you press Cmd-`, get the window you want, and do something in it, then press Cmd-` again, you get back to the first window you were in. If you press Cmd-` repeatedly, you cycle through the available windows of the active application. There is a slight difference in how you trigger the two behaviours—and the behaviour of Cmd-` can sometimes be a little opaque, I grant, since "do something in the window" is not always 100% clear, either to the user or the computer—but they do have analogous behaviours.
      • iso1210 5y ago
        Press Cmd, Press `, Release `, Release Cmd You've swapped from window 1 to window 2 Press Cmd, Press `, Release `, Release Cmd You swap from window 2 to window 3 Press Cmd, Press tab, Release tab, Release Cmd You've swapped from application 1 to application 2 Press Cmd, Press tab, Release tab, Release tab You swap from application 2 to application 1 That if you type something after swapping window and the behaviour changes is even worse! For cycling Press Cmd, Press Tab, release Tab, Press Tab, Release Tab, you can move from application 1 to application 3, although it doesn't switch immediately, just shows you a menu while you hold down Cmd Do this with windows and the actual window changes as you move, not a menu It's poor behaviour and one reason I prefer my linux desktop to my anicent macbook. (Another reason, I've got about 15 opwn terminals, but I can't just raise 1 terminal window above my browser, I have to raise them all. Of course there's no focus-follows-mouse either, it's all very user-unfriendly, at least by default. I'm sure there's some software that might fix this, but back in the 90s when I was using Windows I remember that sort of software was just terrible. The easier option is to finally fix my linux laptop, which died around the time covid started, and thus wasn't a critical path fix)
• kitsunesoba 5y ago
  This is where the value of electron wrappers and web apps installed as PWAs comes in. It offloads app management duties from your browser and puts them back in the hands of the OS. The former of those two can also get rid of redundant menubars (as seen in e.g. Figma) which is a nice bonus.
  • DiggyJohnson 5y ago
    Exactly. When the Electron-apps-are--awful-compared-to-desktop-apps conversation comes up, I'm always frustrsted to not see this perspective, because it really reframes the real potential value of Electron implementations away from (from this perspective, unfair) critical comparison to implementing internet services and applications as true desktop apps.
  • robszumski 5y ago
    I love doing this but my personal hell is when my Google account(s) are constantly signed out of my PWA for Meet, Chat, Work Gmail, Personal Gmail 1, Personal Gmail 2.
  • prmoustache 5y ago
    I quite like the epiphany / gnome-web functionnality to create "apps" out of separate website. Too bad it doesn't work with msteams and I wish firefox had that function as well so I can still use my extensions on thoses.
• samatman 5y ago
  I have a few workflow solutions to this, but Control Down-Arrow or three finger swipe down is the most common. Also, windows are in a stack from least to most recently put in front, so if I know something is toward the back I start with command-~. I also happen to believe that there is such a thing as having too many browser windows open, so when these strategies start to become unmanageable, I will close some. The Expose for browser windows takes up to twelve before it needs to make the icons really small, that's a reasonable limit for me, especially given both tabs and tab groups (which I'm increasingly making good use of). To be clear, this is a workflow, not a workaround: unlike focus follows mouse being impossible, I'm content and productive handling the browser this way.
  • wlesieutre 5y ago
    And if you have so many windows open that it becomes difficult to manage, usually you can sort them into virtual desktops
  • mechanical_bear 5y ago
    I have 409 tabs open at the moment… (more on my desktop computer)
• kevincox 5y ago
  I agree. While I admit that I have only lightly used macOS but for my last job I find it hard to get used to this multidimensional switching. I think it might have made sense where you had a few documents and a few emails and a few folders. But now I have 3 browser windows and 3 terminals and my brain can't get used to the fact that a video call window is in the same group as my reference docs but my text editor is in a different group with my build output. Maybe I should use a different terminal emulator for my editor but that just seems like fighting the window system. Or maybe after a couple more years of macOS and I would get used to it.
  • sooheon 5y ago
    It's just the difference between a depth=2 tree and a flat list. What's better depends on your access patterns, but at least semantically, the tree makes a lot more sense to me.
    • philsnow 5y ago
      I just wish "spaces" worked like xmonad workspaces [0], specifically that in xmonad there are some number of workspaces (9 by default) and each display is a view into _any_ of those. Macos has a checkbox "Displays have separate Spaces", and neither checked nor unchecked gives the behavior I want. Let's say I have just two monitors. That box being checked means I have spaces A1 A2 .. An and B1 B2 .. Bn, and monitor A can display any of the "A" spaces and monitor B can display any of the "B" spaces. But if I want everything from B2 to get displayed on monitor A, I have to create a new space An+1 and drag everything over one window at a time, like a cave man. Unchecked means I have spaces AB1 AB2 .. ABn, and switching spaces switches both monitors at the same time! So if I want to see the A side of AB1 and the B side of AB2 at the same time, I'm out of luck. Xmonad workspaces allow me to do any of the above behaviors (oh, and it switches workspaces instantaneously, instead of this left/right spatial thing macos insists on, I guess because of the trackpad swipe gestures). One of these days I need to try to make Hammerspoon fake workspaces in a way that works for me, because (like the OP) this is by far the least comfortable thing about working in macos for me. [0] https://xmonad.org/tour.html#using-other-workspaces https://xmonad.org/tour.html#using-other-workspaces
• perryizgr8 5y ago
  It doesn't work out well. This is an area of macos that grinds my gears daily. It gets even messier if you maximize an app, or use multiple desktops. Often I need to quickly switch between a particular terminal window to a particular browser window. But it's always a gamble. I don't know what I'm gonna get when I press cmd+tab. It may show the correct window, or it may show all terminal windows, or it may even do absolutely nothing.
  • fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
    So, I have the opposite problem when I go back to using Linux/Windows: I mentally file all my windows into application buckets and it makes the alt-tab switcher for not-macOS seem to pick a random window.
    • perryizgr8 5y ago
      I don't understand what's random about always switching to the last window you were using. It's a simple rule, no exceptions. Macos window/app switching rules are too complicated and full of special cases, which makes it harder to integrate into your work flow.
      • fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
        Because, basically, I don’t think in terms of switching windows, I think in terms of switching tasks/apps and some apps/tasks happen to have a bunch of windows.
        • perryizgr8 5y ago
          It's still easy to understand because it is just one rule, with no exceptions. Comparatively the OSX model is filled with arbitrary rules that depend on many factors (is another window of this app open in a maximised mode?, does the last desktop you were on have no windows?). Even if, with time, you have become comfortable with it, it is still a more convoluted way to manage tasks.
• jeltz 5y ago
  As a lobg time on and off Mac user: nnt very well. The Windows/Xfce method of switching between all Windows within the current workspace fits the modern way if working much better. Yes, Mac also supports switching between Windows in the same application but that is rarely what I want either since I am a heavy user of virtual desktops