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0 pointssross15y ago0 comments

Not answering for everyone, of course, but I find the mac model breaks down when I only want to pull a single window of an app to the foreground.

Envisage, if you will, this scenario. I have multiple terminal windows open in the background connected to various services and my current focus is on my fullscreen IDE of choice. Now my IDE has various pieces of information on it and, given that my short term memory isn't what it once was, I would like to always be able refer to it. So I switch to Terminal and ALL the Terminal windows are pulled above the IDE window, often obscuring the piece of information I wanted to reference.

It's not that the 98-esque model is necessarily superior, it's rather that it's surprising when windows you haven't requested to see are pulled into the foreground. Now this may be due to me having used `window-centric` switching for many years but after 3 years of owning a mac I still find this behaviour frustrating.

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12 comments · 4 top-level

weeksie15y ago· 5 in thread

CMD-` switches between application windows. That might help a bit, I use it constantly; so constantly in fact, that I remapped buffer switching in emacs to that command.

euroclydon15y ago

I'm a hater of the App -> Windows paradigm. I just brought up two finder windows, minimized one, CMD-TAB'd to Chrome, then back to Finder, and finally no amount of CMD-` would make the minimised Finder visible. Plus, just how many mouse actions does it take to tile two windows? Two in Win7, a whole lot more in OSX.

ot15y ago

CMD-` doesn't solve the problem, if you are in an application and you want to bring up a window from another application you still have to use CMD-TAB. But this brings up all the windows from the other application.

msbarnett15y ago

Yeah, the best solution here is definitely exposé. Invoke, select just the window you want via arrow keys or beginning to type the window's title, hit return, and only that window comes forward.

weeksie15y ago

You're totally right, I just skimmed the comment before I posted, my bad.

pstinnett15y ago

Thanks for posting that. Never knew!

Stwerner15y ago· 2 in thread

You might want to check out Visor - http://visor.binaryage.com/ makes your terminal a roll-down fps-like console, and can handle all the tabs as well. I've found it very useful to solve the exact problem you're having.

icarus_drowning15y ago

I can't live without Visor. Its one of my favorite OS X utilities.

Stwerner15y ago

I just realized the other day that you can drag a tab off of visor and use it as a regular terminal window in case you need to look at two terminals at once.

sudont15y ago· 1 in thread

Unfortunately, the traditional way to solve this problem on a mac is to arrange the windows, and remove what wasn't needed. Full-screen apps weren't supposed to be used.

ams611015y ago

Exactly. And now Lion is going to apparently emphasize full-screening apps. This is a complete 180 by Steve Jobs who has hated full-screen apps as long as I can remember.

PCheese15y ago

If you don't mind using the mouse, you can bring a single window to the foreground by right-clicking the corresponding application's Dock icon and selecting it from the list.

Another more visual option (that you can manage with keyboard only) is to use Exposé. In Snow Leopard, press the Exposé key on the keyboard (or set your own shortcut), start typing the name of the window you want, and press return to bring only that window to the foreground.

I've found these to be pretty good built-in solutions to the single-window problem.

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