Uncategorized
Window Switching in OS X
While barney
and I were hanging out this weekend, he raised a problem in osx that I
had not really ever noticed. Because most of the applications I
use are all contained within one window. Firefox has tabs,
Eclipse has tabs, Mail only has one window. The problem comes
when you use the keyboard shortcut (cmd+tab) to switch applications,
that is all you get - just applications. So if you have
Dreamweaver open with a few docs, or multiple browsers, you can not
pick "which" of these windows you actually want.
So being the good friend that I am, I went looking because this
bothered him ( and because I was bored, probably more about me being
bored). What I found was a recent post over at Eric’s site. He posted (only 1 day earlier) about a program called "which". Which is an application switching utility that allows you to switch between actual windows, not just applications.
It appears to be a very useful solution so I wanted to share. I
remembered finding this today, while reading this post over at Sean’s site.
One of the comments was talking about application switching using
spotlight (which I dont get but I will leave it alone 
). So if
you ever run into this problem, take a look at Which.
25 May 2005 Simeon
Try cmd-tilde to switch between windows of the current app. Also, we get Expose!
Being a PC user by ‘birth’ and having recently done the ’switch’, I initially had a problem with the window switching implementation in OSX. While it is true (as far as I’ve found) that cmd+tab only switches between applications, I accidently found that hitting cmd+` (non-shift tilde key) will switch between the currently active applications open windows. Using both of these keyboard combinations, I can switch to an application and then switch to the particular window I need.
Having said that, it seems that not all applications will support this key combo, for whatever reason I am not sure, but most main-stream applications I use support it without a problem.
I’m sure that I’m not the only one to have noticed this functionality, but I thought I would add it to this article for those that don’t.
I downloaded which and I like it. It even limits it’s selections to the active desktop (if you’re using the pager), but the thing on seans list is more about … like the open command. Go to a terminal and type open -a textedit or open myfile.doc. That’s the functionality, but it’s kind of a bummer to have to have a terminal open - it would be better to just have some key stroke. Know what I mean? - I think there is a widget for that…
I’ve been using:
OSX Application Switcher
Which - gives focus to those windows too
OSX Expose
And with those 3 things right there, you can do most anything you’d want to. Hope lots find it enjoyable. Saves me tons of time.