When comparing two things on one small screen, I want to be able to rapidly switch between two windows. Depending on if it's within same app, I have to think to use either Cmd+Tab or Cmd+`. And all the minimized apps, as well as apps on other desktops get in the way.

Mission Control is unacceptable for rapid window switching because it requires me to move the mouse pointer and find the other window, when all I want to do is "select previous window".

Not a perfect solution, but it's a big improvement imo over Cmd+`.

The problem is that pressing Ctrl+F4 twice in a row keeps iterating over the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. windows. So if you want to switch between two most recently windows, you have to press Ctrl+F4, then Ctrl+Shift+F4, then Ctrl+F4, then Ctrl+Shift+F4, etc.

It takes some getting used to.

And can we get a comment about launchpad? and widgets? considering how good the iOS experience is, the desktop launchpad is horrible. and widgets should be removed, rethought or integrated for sure. both of these strike me as afterthoughts, which is bizarre considering how central they appear when you first set up the OS.

1. Minimize a window (Command+M). 2. Switch applications (Command+Tab). 3. Switch back to the application with the minimized window (Command+Tab). Before you release the Command key, hold down the Option key. Now release the command key.

Voila--your minimized window will return from the dock.

OS X widgets turned out about as well as every other attempt to make desktop widgets. Banishing them to their own virtual desktop solves the problem of it being impossible to use them due to that there's always windows in the way, but it doesn't solve the problem that apparently no one actually has any ideas for desktop widgets that are more than mildly useful.

Use Hide (Cmd-H).

Widgets are antiquated and just there for legacy reasons.

You may also need to hold down the function key if you have your keyboard setup the default way, where things like brightness, volume, etc. are the primary uses of the function keys.

- Mission Control

- cmd+tab

- cmd+`

- ctrl+f4

- Switch, a tool which enables Opt+tab

- contextsformac

- cmd+~ (only in some cases)

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.it/2008/04/settling-osx-focus-fo...

That's kind of old though. Have they fixed it? I doubt it's a priority.

Mavericks' blessed addition of per-screen menu bars has the nice side effect of making this a little more noticeable: The menu bar is transparent on a screen without the active window. Terminal.app also can be customized to make inactive windows partially transparent. I wish that option were system-wide.

In Windows, I can use Win+left/right keys to make a window take up precisely half of the screen. I can press Win+up_arrow to fullscreen a window.

On Linux, I can use tiling window managers like Dwm or Xmonad to fullfil all my tiling needs.

In OS X, I can full screen or have to manually deal with each and every window. It's awful.

Thanks for your answer.

[1]: http://www.boastr.net/

* ShiftIt: https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt

* Spectacle: https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle

http://spectacleapp.com/

FTFY.

Once again the old internet wisdom of "you can only get help by disguising your question as whining" is proved true: http://bash.org/?152037

Also: animations. They're great for demos, but when you're trying to get serious work done they're irritating and you can't turn them off without some commandline-fu. I get the impression apple pretty much will always prioritize gloss over functionality.

I do agree with your Launchpad comment and just drag Application folder into the right side of the Dock (settings Sort by Name, Display as Folder, View Contents as List) along with Utilities, Documents, and Downloads (Sort by Date Added).

It's been a long time since I used a mouse to launch an app.