Mac annoyances
I use a Macintosh (a PowerBook G4) as my development system at one of my jobs. For the most part I find MacOS X pretty smooth sailing, but there are a few niggling little things that irritate me on a daily basis.
- Command-tab beef #1: It ignores minimized windows. I minimize an app’s only window and do some stuff in another app. Now I hit Command-tab to get back to the first app — and nothing happens. Well, not nothing: I get the first app’s menu bar. It really ought to act as if I’d clicked on the app’s icon in the dock. That does the right thing: switch to the app’s active window if there is one and expand one of the app’s windows if they’re all minimized.
- Command-tab beef #2: It’s not so useful for multi-window apps. This one hits me in mail composition all the time. I type some text into my message composition window, switch over to another app, then Command-tab back to the mail reader — and it has decided for some reason that the main mail reader window should be on top now, not the composition window I was just looking at. There is, as far as I can tell, no keyboard shortcut to cycle through the active windows rather than the active apps, so I end up mousing up to the app’s Window menu and choosing the window I want. And asking myself what good that keyboard “shortcut” just did me. (If there’s a “cycle through windows” shortcut that’d probably take care of my beef #1 too.)
Update: I’m told Command-tilde (~) cycles through windows within the current app, which mostly takes care of this beef (though I’d still prefer to be able to cycle through windows regardless of which app they’re associated with and whether they’re minimized or not.) - Multi-monitor beef: Windows get reshuffled. When I unplug my external monitor from the PowerBook, all the windows that were on the second monitor are moved to the same positions on the PowerBook screen (or as close as they can get, anyway). And all the windows that were on the PowerBook get shoved down to the bottom of the screen. It should keep the PowerBook screen’s windows in the same place and put the external monitor’s windows down at the bottom. I find myself undoing the OS’s window shuffling every time I plug in or unplug an external monitor — just leave the windows alone as much as you can, Mr. Mac, please!
- Terminal beef: No select-and-paste. Windows (PuTTY, specifically) and Linux (xterm and just about everything else) both support selecting a block of text in a terminal window and pasting it into another terminal window with a single mouse click. I have a 3-button trackball hooked up to my Mac most of the time — let me paste with that middle button, please!
If anyone knows how to tweak the configuration to address some or all of these, please post a comment here and I’ll update the article so it’s useful for others in the future.
March 17th, 2006 at 5:32 am
you can switch through active windows of an application by using Command-~ (tilde). This is next to Z on my UK keyboard (next to 1 on a US keyboard, I think). Hope this helps!
March 20th, 2006 at 12:15 am
Instead of minimizing windows, try hiding the app (i.e., command-H). This won’t work if you only want to hide one window in an open program, but that’s what command-tilde is for
March 20th, 2006 at 8:06 am
Command-H is definitely helpful and makes Alt-Tab work closer to the way I want, but I still find myself doing more mousing around than I’d like.
I’ve come to realize the source of the problem is an app-centric vs. a window-centric view of the world. Which I guess boils down to what kind of application you typically use. If your typical app is something like Photoshop, where there are lots of little windows open when you’re working on just one document, then the Mac approach is just fine.
If, on the other hand, you often have a bunch of only somewhat related windows open (Terminal windows, in my case), then what you have is really a bunch of apps that happen to be the same underlying program. The fact that they’re the same binary is incidental. If I have five terminal windows open, each doing something completely different, I want the UI to give me quick ways to switch between windows and hide/show them, not quick ways to deal with all of them en masse. In fact, I don’t think I’ve *ever* wanted to hide all my terminal windows at once.
I wonder if it would work to make a bunch of copies of the Terminal app and run them separately. Hmm.
September 1st, 2006 at 4:18 am
In the new beta of Firefox, command-backtick/tilde doesn’t work, and so there is no obvious way to switch between the active windows that you are browsing without resorting to using the mouse. This has been driving me crazy for about 3 hours now. Everything else about it is great, and so I can’t go back to my previous Firefox/Safari combo where I would gorw frustrated with one after 2 hours and switch to the other (repeat ad inifitum), so I spent a while searching for a solution.
The answer is: fn+ctrl+F4.
It acts like Alt-Tab for windows. Flips through active windows across all apps.
Solves my problem and yours!
(I prefer the Windows Alt-Tab behvaior as well, probably because I program in terminal windows and open a bunch of browswer windows that I consider almost separate apps.)
Now I just have to figure out a way to remap my keyboard so that fn+ctrl-F4 is something I can actually type with one hand.
September 1st, 2006 at 8:06 am
You can get rid of the need to type “fn” by going to the Keyboard & Mouse system preferences, Keyboard tab, and checking the “Use the F1-F12 keys to control software features” checkbox. That flips the use of “fn” so you have to use it for stuff like controlling the volume but not for typing function keys into applications. I find it more usable that way since I use a few apps that want me to hit f3, etc.
October 7th, 2006 at 2:39 pm
Terminal.app can easily be made to support Unix middle button paste. Simply install X11 and run it once. It modifes Terminal.app to support xterm-like selection-paste.