Does Command tab not do this?

It brings up a list of applications in most recently to least recently used order, so two apps switched to/from will constantly switch places.

Not if the windows are both from the same program. Then it's a different keybind, CMD-~ which doesn't have the same priority order style as CMD-Tab. I get caught up on this constantly, to the point where I decided to stop using one Chrome window under my work profile, and one under my personal profile, just so I can have my personal browser under a different program so CMD-Tab works better.

Is that window priority order governed by the OS or the application?

I don't recall the difficulty you mention happening with Safari.

I actually use Edge for personal stuff on my work MacBook for this exact reason. The workflow simply isn’t possible otherwise.

> It brings up a list of applications

"Applications" is the problem. I want to switch between windows.

cmd-tab does this. what are we missing? cmd-tab, cmd-tab. terminal, browser. browser, terminal. has for years.

That switches between apps, not windows. Open two browser windows and two terminals. Try to switch between one terminal and one browser without bringing all the other windows to the fore. You can't do it.

Windows (and most Unix WMs, I don't know where it actually originated) style alt-tab maintains a stack of recent windows. So you can hit alt-tab repeatedly to swap between the two most recent, or hit alt-tab-tab-tab to bring up only the 4th most recent window, etc.

ahh sorry I didn't understand. I'm so used to cmt-tab, cmd-` but I'm not at all claiming that's "most" efficient. makes sense why people would want that. I wish Apple would "just" add a fucking checkbox somewhere for that. Seems like a thing people really want.

Use contexts app.

I'm using virtual desktops in FlashSpace for that. There's also a third party utility called Alt-Tab that can do that.