alt Hacker News>3 people from my team recently switched to macOS and they never owned a mac before and they are all complaining about window management.
For legit reasons? Because many switchers complain for stupid reasons, like the macOS distinction between apps and windows.
Replies
jbverschoor • yesterday at 2:48 AM
Mac power user 25+ years.
Yes, it’s complete shit
Complaining about the distinction between apps and windows isn't a "stupid reason" to complain though.
Say I use Slack, Teams and Outlook. If I use their Electron versions, I switch between them with cmd+tab. If I use them in separate browser windows, I switch between them by using cmd+tab to switch to Firefox, then cmd+` to cycle through windows until I find the one I want. That's weird; how you switch between these three apps depend on the technical details on how you opened them? Why?
Say I have neovim, the mutt email client, and a shell open. These are three separate apps, but because they happen to run in a terminal emulator, I still have to cmd+tab to the terminal emulator, then cmd+` to cycle between them. They're semantically different applications in dedicated windows, but technical implementation details mean they belong to what macOS considers "the same app", just like the "apps in Firefox windows" example above.
It wouldn't be so bad if the cmd+` "cycle between windows in the app" feature worked well. But it doesn't. Unlike cmd+tab, it doesn't show a bar which you get to select from, it just instantly re-orders your windows; and it's impossible to select a window in another workspace. That means, if I have Slack open in Firefox in workspace 1 and Outlook open in Chrome in workspace 2, I can switch between Slack and Outlook with cmd+tab, but if I Slack open in Firefox in workspace 1 and Outlook open in Firefox in workspace 2, there is no way to switch between Slack and Outlook. That's pretty bad.