<story><title>AltTab – Windows alt-tab on macOS</title><url>https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>klodolph</author><text>&amp;gt; The difference is largely a historical artifact of the Macintosh operating system not originally supporting &amp;quot;multitasking.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;This is a nice story, but reading on it seems like you&amp;#x27;re saying that the way app switching works on Windows as the Obvious and Correct thing to do, and that the Macintosh way of doing things is nothing more than a choice that was made too long ago to change.&lt;p&gt;Honestly, that&amp;#x27;s absurd.&lt;p&gt;The Macintosh has a menu bar at the top of the screen which belongs to the foreground application. This is a reasonable place to put a menu bar, because it is easy to click on things which are at the edge or (better yet) corner of the screen. This is a perfectly reasonable justification for having a foreground application.&lt;p&gt;Windows places the menu bar inside each window. So there is no need for &amp;quot;foreground application&amp;quot;, only foreground window.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s all that you need in terms of explanation. The Mac puts its menu bar at the top of the screen, Windows puts it inside each window. There&amp;#x27;s no need to tell some story about how the Macintosh was created during a more primitive era of computing history, because that story has no explanatory power.</text></item><item><author>yodon</author><text>For Mac users asking &amp;quot;how is this different from the keystrokes I already have&amp;quot;, this app is designed to give you Windows-style switching which is subtlety but fundamentally different from OSX-style window switching.&lt;p&gt;MacOS is app-centric, so you have a keystroke to switch between apps and a keystroke to switch through the windows of the app. Windows is window-centric rather than app-centric, with a unified window stack so a single keystroke (Alt-Tab) always takes you to the previous window, regardless of what app is responsible for that window. Repeated Alt-Tab&amp;#x27;s take you back through your most recently used windows, regardless of the Apps involved.&lt;p&gt;OSX users generally can&amp;#x27;t imagine not knowing what apps their windows are associated with, and Windows users generally can&amp;#x27;t imagine being expected to care what apps their windows are associated with.&lt;p&gt;The difference is largely a historical artifact of the Macintosh operating system not originally supporting &amp;quot;multitasking.&amp;quot; When the Mac first came out, it could only run one application at a time. If you wanted to switch between a spreadsheet and a word processor you had to close one application and open the other. Then the concept of a &amp;quot;switcher&amp;quot; was invented, which gave you the sense that the Mac was running multiple applications because it could do app-to-app context switching behind the scenes to make it feel like you were running multiple applications simultaneously. All of this meant there was no OS-level concept of &amp;quot;the window stack&amp;quot; there was only an app-level concept of window history, and a separate OS-level concept of app history.&lt;p&gt;Windows launched after the Mac, into an era of slightly more powerful processors and better understanding of user behavior on truly multi-application devices. These differences led Microsoft to adopt an OS-level unified window history model. Apple undoubtedly discussed the idea, but even by the time Windows launched Mac users were fully accustomed to the Mac&amp;#x27;s windowing model and would have complained mightily at the conceptual switch had it been attempted then or at any other point in time.&lt;p&gt;The more time you spend in one ecosystem, the more natural its approach feels to you, because you adapt to your environment over time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Shacklz</author><text>&amp;gt; This is a perfectly reasonable justification for having a foreground application.&lt;p&gt;Except when you start having multiple monitors. Then it&amp;#x27;s an utter mess, and I have no idea how the Mac-enthusiasts are putting up with it. And as far as I&amp;#x27;m aware, most actually kind of don&amp;#x27;t - the few mac-enthusiasts that I know all use their customized setup that heavily relies on third-party-tools.</text></comment>
<story><title>AltTab – Windows alt-tab on macOS</title><url>https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>klodolph</author><text>&amp;gt; The difference is largely a historical artifact of the Macintosh operating system not originally supporting &amp;quot;multitasking.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;This is a nice story, but reading on it seems like you&amp;#x27;re saying that the way app switching works on Windows as the Obvious and Correct thing to do, and that the Macintosh way of doing things is nothing more than a choice that was made too long ago to change.&lt;p&gt;Honestly, that&amp;#x27;s absurd.&lt;p&gt;The Macintosh has a menu bar at the top of the screen which belongs to the foreground application. This is a reasonable place to put a menu bar, because it is easy to click on things which are at the edge or (better yet) corner of the screen. This is a perfectly reasonable justification for having a foreground application.&lt;p&gt;Windows places the menu bar inside each window. So there is no need for &amp;quot;foreground application&amp;quot;, only foreground window.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s all that you need in terms of explanation. The Mac puts its menu bar at the top of the screen, Windows puts it inside each window. There&amp;#x27;s no need to tell some story about how the Macintosh was created during a more primitive era of computing history, because that story has no explanatory power.</text></item><item><author>yodon</author><text>For Mac users asking &amp;quot;how is this different from the keystrokes I already have&amp;quot;, this app is designed to give you Windows-style switching which is subtlety but fundamentally different from OSX-style window switching.&lt;p&gt;MacOS is app-centric, so you have a keystroke to switch between apps and a keystroke to switch through the windows of the app. Windows is window-centric rather than app-centric, with a unified window stack so a single keystroke (Alt-Tab) always takes you to the previous window, regardless of what app is responsible for that window. Repeated Alt-Tab&amp;#x27;s take you back through your most recently used windows, regardless of the Apps involved.&lt;p&gt;OSX users generally can&amp;#x27;t imagine not knowing what apps their windows are associated with, and Windows users generally can&amp;#x27;t imagine being expected to care what apps their windows are associated with.&lt;p&gt;The difference is largely a historical artifact of the Macintosh operating system not originally supporting &amp;quot;multitasking.&amp;quot; When the Mac first came out, it could only run one application at a time. If you wanted to switch between a spreadsheet and a word processor you had to close one application and open the other. Then the concept of a &amp;quot;switcher&amp;quot; was invented, which gave you the sense that the Mac was running multiple applications because it could do app-to-app context switching behind the scenes to make it feel like you were running multiple applications simultaneously. All of this meant there was no OS-level concept of &amp;quot;the window stack&amp;quot; there was only an app-level concept of window history, and a separate OS-level concept of app history.&lt;p&gt;Windows launched after the Mac, into an era of slightly more powerful processors and better understanding of user behavior on truly multi-application devices. These differences led Microsoft to adopt an OS-level unified window history model. Apple undoubtedly discussed the idea, but even by the time Windows launched Mac users were fully accustomed to the Mac&amp;#x27;s windowing model and would have complained mightily at the conceptual switch had it been attempted then or at any other point in time.&lt;p&gt;The more time you spend in one ecosystem, the more natural its approach feels to you, because you adapt to your environment over time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alphachloride</author><text>With window-specific menus, I can directly click on and open the menu button of another app&amp;#x2F;window without first having to focus it first to see the menu options. I find that to be more intuitive.&lt;p&gt;I have always been a windows user and my intuition was shaped accordingly. So to me that is the obvious and correct thing to do.</text></comment>