The app switching behaviour is really infuriating. Selecting a window and having all the app’s windows come to the fore, obscuring the window from another app is still annoying, 20 years on.

And then when you full-screen a window, switch to another app for a moment, and then you can’t find it without delving into the ‘window‘ menu.

First world problems. But daily annoyances.

> Selecting a window and having all the app’s windows come to the fore

... would only happen if the application you switch to is enforcing it for some reason. Ordinarily you can interleave windows all you want.

Switching to an application by clicking on it in the Dock or Cmd+Tabbing to it will bring all its windows to the front, though.

You're right, I'm thinking of using the keyboard cmd-tab.

So if I have two Zed windows and Firefox in front of one of them, I can't switch from Zed to Firefox and back to Zed without losing view of Firefox. Means I have to move windows around so they don't overlap, which seems so counterintuitive.

You need to use CMD + ` instead of CMD + Tab

That only switches within an app, not between apps.

Unless you mean to find the full-screen window. And that doesn't work either. At least for Zed, Firefox and iTerm, where I spend most of my life.

Or just install alt tab to override that behavior and don't look back.

https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/

If I wanted to use gestures, three/four finger swipe up and down shows all of the windows and all of the desktops with windows respectively. If I'm switching using the keyboard, I get window previews. If I'm switching using the dock, I get window previews.

Going back to macOS where I don't get window previews forces me to think in terms of app icons, instead of the UI I've been staring at and will instantly recognize. And if I use the dock, I have to remember the window title's name to switch windows using the context menu.

Funny, I've been using Macs for 10+ years and I've never really used Expose. Often I'd be trying to select between windows that look very similar (eg, code windows), so it doesn't work. Instead, I just use Cmd+Tab, and then Cmd+` to cycle windows.

Exactly. I find the macOS approach (Cmd-Tab to pick the right app, Cmd-` to pick the right window) much faster/better than just one shortcut to go through all windows.

Imagine having N apps with M windows each, with the macOS model your number of presses to find a given window goes from O(NM) to O(N+M).

This is how it works in Plasma, you can use the app switcher key combo to switch between apps and then the app window switcher combo to switch between that app's windows. You can also go through every single window, if you want.