Command-Tab Mayhem
Wow. Who knew two little keys could create such mayhem in the Mac world, within minutes of Panther’s release?
The latest blathering of spite comes from the normally vanilla Kottke:
Here’s what I propose. Ditch the existing clunky Exposé behavior (perhaps except for the “Show Desktop” keystroke) in favor of a combined Cmd-Tab/Exposé behavior. Hitting Cmd-Tab would bring up a palette of all the open windows (not just applications) and would also Exposé all open windows. Continuing to hold down Cmd and hitting Tab would cycle through each icon in the palette (which would need to be smaller to not overpower the Exposéd windows) but would also highlight the corresponding Exposéd window. When you reach the window you need, you let go of the Cmd key and the window pops open.
It’s like they never open the System Preferences and check out what you can actually customize about Exposé. What I’ve found is that the mouse gesture-enabled Exposé is much more easy to use than invoking it via the keyboard. After all, in order to use the default F9-F11 keystrokes, you have to take your hand off of the mouse, which is pretty much an annoying idea.
And if you combine using the bottom-left corner to invoke Exposé with command tab, you end up with something very similar to what Kottke suggests – minus the window-centric Windows idea of having Command-tab show every window instead of every application. That would be problematic and way too Windows-ish for most Mac folks to stand.
And then, if Kottke read MacOSXHints. he’d know that if you:
- Invoke Exposé via a mouse gesture
- Hit command-tab and
- Select an appliction with it, that
- Then, you’ll end up with an Exposéd list of every document in that application. Click the window you want.
Sounds complicated, but it really isnt, since it uses mouse gestures (very easy to work into your workflow) and a keybaord shortcut already in use. If you really wanted to get fancy with it, you could use the arrow keys once you have one application’s windows open to select a window, and spacebar to select it. Again, sounds complicated; isn’t.
Is this exactly what Kottke’s whining about? No, but it’s the closest Mac-native implementation he’s going to get. Don’t hold your breath for Apple to dive into a window-centric behavior like the one he’s describing. Exposé’s ‘Show all windows’ feature and this use of it, is the only way for Apple to do it (built into the OS at least) due to their HIG, which states that the MacOS is document and application centric, not window-centric. You use an application to edit documents, not your operating system to edit your windows. I’m not doing a very good explanation of that concept. I’ll see if I can try to find something a little more concise…
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5 Replies to “Command-Tab Mayhem”
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yep, people spouting off before they really played with it…
I think your point could have been made without being mean. Jason is a cool guy and just because he didn’t check all the prefs doesn’t make him vanilla or and idiot.
Our design/blog/mac community needs constructive criticsm and friendly tips not name calling and embarrasment.
You should know this more than anyone when this community helped a little bit with donations.
Let’s all be friendsand help each other… It’s just a stupid Mac upgrade. Who really cares in the long run?
I dont see the word idiot in there anywhere? and mean? whats mean? He pointed out a valid flaw in a “review” of a published online critisicm.
personally I think it’s the best damn feature of 10.3…
oh, no, i didnt mean to be mean. and after all, i’ve been illegally using a beta of the damn thing for months. i meant vanilla in the sense that he normally just kind of talks about bland things and doesnt often jump into an ‘apple should do this’ kind of thing. and yes, i do agree that the mac community, even though we want more users, we can be very off-putting to the outside world when you criticize us. we’re very aware and guilty of that, and i’ve tried to change the tone a bit. i recently joined Something Awful and have found the users to be very courteous. When someone asked about buying a mac, we were all very helpful and kind. A new mac user asked about good mac forums and people started jumping in about how most mac forums (even ones i tend to frequent) can be very pointless and annoying. I took this to heart and have been trying to change that with my posts. The “Windoze suxx!! Macs Ro0l!!” type posts are grating and a waste of bandwidth for the service that hosts them. This is never more apparent than in the #macfilez IRC forum, which I’ve stopped going to because of the “newbies are stupid and deserved to be derided at any chance we get” rule they seem to have. If you aren’t logged into there 24/7 and actually admit to wanting warez (the entire reason the channel exists). you’ll be chastized and eventually kicked or banned. I guess my point was that the mac UI is very deep and can often accomodate your needs, you just have to think of combining things in a slightly different way. More often than not, the apple developers have thought of things way before you even thought you needed them.