All I want is an app that can fix the "broken window" focus management. Like when I click a window, Mac OS brings to top all windows of the respective app, and when an app (say, Finder) has no window open currently, bringing it to front also unaskedly manipulates the stacking order such that other app's windows become the top most one, completely destroying the visual context. Also, back in the days I used Expose a lot to navigate, but it has completely lost any spatial determinism and usefulness for me. These issues are very noticable, and feel gross and like a team of ignorants has messed around; it's very irritating that nobody is speaking about it.
It seems so, but what the Front and Center app serms specifically created for is switching towards the undesired behavior of bringing all windows to the front on click when that is exactly what my OS does and what I want to get away from. :confused:
I just want a Finder that actually works. It’s pretty incredible just how bad Finder is. It’s by far the worst piece of software I’m forced to use on a daily basis.
I can use it as an orthodox file manager (with the f keys I remember from Norton Commander). I also like using it to access remote filesystems over nfs and sftp, and also S3 buckets. It also works well with Dropbox and iCloud. There is a great sync feature to keep source and target directories synchronised. It's also good for diffing directories at a glance. It's good at managing archive files too. Plus the regex file rename feature is often handy for me - I have a few presets saved for various purposes. It's also my go-to MacOS uninstaller, as it gathers the related files.
Yes, I was thinking the same.. For several years, I'm pretty happy with PathFinder by Cocoatech: https://cocoatech.io/
The things I miss the most when I accidentically open a Finder window: Cut files wit CMD+X to move them (never understood this when coming from Windows), cycle the files in a folder (start on top if you reach bottom and vice versa) and the comprehensive info bar on the right for files and folders. Give it a try :)
I always feel like I'm missing something, but I find the creation of new folders really awkward. I'd like to just be able to right-click on a folder or even on a file or between two files and have it create a new folder there. But the new folder option is not available in those cases. I have to go to File->New Folder or click on the empty bottom of the screen, create the new folder there, and then drag it. Would love to hear if someone can offer tips for this.
i mean ... is it possible to move a file? the context menu doesn't seem to have a corresponding entry.
currently have a weird situation where a bunch of folders are arranged horizontally and go beyond the right border of the window. but there is no horizontal scroll bar indicating that.
the windows xp/nt/2000 file explorer is the pinnacle of file exploring experience. basically every linux file explorer just more or less copied it - for good reason. but no - apple has to reinvent the wheel and came up with a messed up hexagon.
On Ventura here, and it only does that if you click the app icon on the dock or use Alt-Tab to switch apps. If you just click a window it does not bring all of the other windows from that app to the front.
> when I click a window, Mac OS brings to top all windows of the respective app
Do you mean Cmd + Tab? Because this doesn't happen for me at all. When I click on a window, just that window is focused, but if I Alt + Tab to an app all those windows come to the front, which I find annoying too.
Hijacking for a quick tip I'm not sure everyone is familiar with. On macOS, most know that Cmd + Tab will cycle through the open apps. Less well-known, Cmd + ` will cycle through windows within an app.
I use https://rectangleapp.com/ on Mac and it's great. I mostly use shortcuts Left Half and Right Half, and also Maximize (Not the fullscreen mode thank God)
It only does that if you click the app icon on the dock or use Alt-Tab to switch apps. If you just click a window it does not bring all of the other windows from that app to the front.
I guess that it is not what you want to hear, but just use a Linux desktop, like cinnamon!
Apple pretend to do ergonomic but their window manager is full of frustration. Using cinnamon is a breeze with everything working well as expected. Even having multi-screens and having apps in menu on the correct screen where they are located.
I usually have open multiple Firefox, console, folder, pdf windows and my life under os-x was a nightmare.
Impossible to have one bottom icon per window (I tried everything, even U-bar that was my hope is just garbage), to not have all windows of the same app open when you click on the icon like Firefox, having to do right click on the icon all the time to go from one window of console to the other, terminals having tabs and window mixed in the menu bar,...
Yeah thanks, actually I've left Linux for Mac OS, and while I do have Linux (and Windows) notebooks for specific needs I have no plans to return to it as my main machine. The reason is simply that I couldn't stand witnessing mainstream Linux desktop regressing into dysfunctionality for me (as in causing physical pain), and I'm sick of developers fetishizing de-facto proprietary containers, programming languages, system frameworks, or ideologies instead of creating apps I would actually want to use.
Yea I also hate that. If i have two terminals on two screens then click on one, all the terminals are now in the foreground and blocking the IDE/whatever…
Not the OP, but I never know where a specific application will show up. Sometimes Chrome is on the left and my IDE is on the top right, sometimes it's the opposite. If it relates to the window location, I can't tell. Always mostly the same set of five or six applications, too.
Original Expose ca 2003 minimised windows from their live positions on the regular desktop to thumbnails in a quick and smooth animation and would leave minimised thumbnails at different sizes resembling their relative live sizes and aspect ratio.
- Use Alfred. Game changer. It's an immediate improvement on spotlight search, you can run commands with three keystrokes (rather than opening a terminal, just command + space, then > <cmd>), it gives clipboard history and fast append (lets you press command + c twice fast to append to clipboard, and opt + command + c to search clipboard history), and lets you make 'workflows' to make frequent tasks extremely streamlined (I use one to open LLM prompts in five LLMs, so I press command + space 'llm <prompt>' and 5 browser tabs open with the same prompt in grok, claude, chatgpt, perplexity, and (local) deepseek.
- Itsycal: an 'install and forget' calendar for your menu bar (it also uses vim keybindings to move around the calendar which is a fun yet practical easter egg)
- There's still no good window manager for macOS. Rectangle is as close as it gets, but it's not good IMO because it only works on non full size windows. (the solution is just get ninja-like with three finger swipe, and endure using the mouse/trackpad more than you'd prefer)
The product is good, but there’s a lot of telemetry that I was not comfortable with given that search bar like those may see very sensitive information.
I guess that’s the modern way to approach development.
> - There's still no good window manager for macOS. Rectangle is as close as it gets, but it's not good IMO because it only works on non full size windows. (the solution is just get ninja-like with three finger swipe, and endure using the mouse/trackpad more than you'd prefer)
I use Magnet and it does the job well. If you're familiar with it, I'd love to know why you don't think it's a good window manager. Or do you just mean there's not a good NATIVE window manager for the OS?
+1 for magnet. Indispensable to the extent that on rare occasions I use others Macs where it’s not installed I’ll gift it to them (and they invariably become passionate about it).
I only tried the intersection of 'free' and 'trusted' (the latter being subjective, based on a glance at website/repo). I hadn't yet tried Magnet, but I see it's $5 so I'll splash out over the weekend and give it a try. Thanks for the rec! Any newb tips appreciated.
I used to use tiling window managers on Linux, but I found out that my Mac usage contains lots of “graphical” apps that don't like to live in a quarter of the screen or something like that.
So I've embraced overlapping windows. I strategically place them so that the import parts are visible. For example, my IDE is full screen, but the browser is only 70% with and height or so (so that the left 30% and the bottom 30% of the IDE are visible, which conveniently lets me peek into the log of the currently running program.
I have a Hammerspoon configuration that conjures up a modal window on a keypress, and then additional keypresses move the current window to a predefined position and size, e.g. m to maximize and p for the top right corner (70% width and 70% height).
I also have some keybindings in that modal window to jump to an app, e.g. w for the browser, i for the IDE, t for the email client, space for the terminal.
I very very rarely manually move a window around, one of the preset positions/sizes usually works for me.
Same. My eyesight getting worse has been a big factor for me. The days of having all my active tools neatly organized and visible simultaneously is over, even with multiple large monitors.
Why not just have all your windows fullscreen and three finger swipe between them like macOS was designed to be used. If you dont like the extremely opinionated macOS window design why not just use Linux?
> There's still no good window manager for macOS. Rectangle is as close as it gets, but it's not good IMO because it only works on non full size windows. (the solution is just get ninja-like with three finger swipe, and endure using the mouse/trackpad more than you'd prefer)
I don’t know your requirements for good, but I like Mizage’s Divvy. Works on Mac and Windows and can configure gTile similarly on Linux.
Used Divvy for years, but switched to Moom last year and I’m very happy with it. One feature I particularly like is being able to set up “chains” of window positions to a single shortcut, so you can trigger it multiple times and it will cycle through different positions. I do miss the little grid layout window a bit, but Moom works a lot better for me overall.
I've been using the Amethyst window manager for ~10 years. It's open-source and generally works well, though it occasionally requires a restart (the app, not the OS)
I’ve tried multiple different tools, but none really felt right - probably because I was using i3 on my desktop. And then I found aerospace, which is inspired by i3 and uses a lot of clever tricks to achieve this
AeroSpace is really nice, when it works. As soon as I use more of CPU, for example to compile something, it gets unusably slow, as in 5 seconds to do anything slow. The worst part is that the workspaces are virtual, so when you kill it, you're left with a tens of pixel-sized windows in Mission Control.
So I went back to yabai. It gets the jobs done fine.
I lived with Alfred for many-many years, but Raycast seems much better this days. Simpler yet richer and constantly developed, many plugins, it's simple to do your own and... it has window manager
Is Raycast open source at all? With nearly $50M of funding (most recently $30M series B last fall) I have to wonder about the long term sustainability and whether I want to invest my time and workflows into the whims of a VC backed “free forever” plan.
Alfred has been around for ages and I’m reasonably confident the developers aren’t going to screw me.
Development has been slow lately, but Quicksilver[0] is still around as a FOSS alternative. We have an upcoming release that should refresh things a bit for Seqouia.
Agreed. Spotlight search does quite well for me. I think there is a discoverability problem with native mac functionality. People tend to install lots of software that duplicates native features
I have no problems with Spotlight search. I use Alfred for the plug-ins, it's extensibility, workflows, clipboard history, everything else it can do.
Alfred search, in fact, really irritates me in that I've not found a good way to limit the search space. No, I really don't want files inside various node_modules folders filling up the search results. <Sigh> I'll try Spotlight, or go directory traversing, again. Anyone have a solution for that?
One thing that’s been annoying me about desktop/window management is that whenever I’ve organized my windows that I need for one project on one desktop, I eventually need to upgrade vscode or warp or macOS needs to be updated. And then restarting an app it forgets on which desktop each window was running… I typically have 3-5 projects open that I switch between (and trying to organize them on different desktops has been sort of futile.)
Anyone know how to pin a window to a desktop so that it remembers this across restarts?
I wanted to like it, but like all tiling window managers for macOS, it feels too tacked on and janky. For instance, Finder tabs simply aren't possible when using Aerospace.
I settled for Cmd+Ctrl+[h|j|k|l] window snapping via Hammerspoon, and let my Arch/Hyprland box keep the tiling window manager.
I find rectangle to be pretty good after needing a replacement for sizeup when development stopped there. My solution is to just ignore the existence of the full screen windows in favor of using the max window size shortcut to fill the current display. Then I can send a window to another display or resize it with shortcuts that are easy enough to get used to and avoid all the transitions that take seconds. The whole full screen experience is so bad otherwise, and this is from someone that is very used to the trackpad and all their gestures.
I have found simple hammerspoon scripts to be a great alternative to a windows manager. You can map keys to some parts of the screen. It also supports multi-display systems.
I just made my own window manager with Hammerspoon. First I copied whatever rectangle/magnet was doing and then added my own logic on top of it to fit the style I work with windows.
As a bonus I can hit hyper-l (L for layout) and it'll open the correct apps + place them correctly depending on where I am and how many monitors are connected.
And caps-lock is of course mapped as hyper with Karabiner Elements, it even has a preset for it.
Also, I was only using Karabiner for caps remapping and was able to satisfactorily replace it with this type of built-in hidutil call: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203239 -- remaps to F19, which I use as a hyper modal in hammerspoon. Works well, and I was happy to let go of Karabiner given how deeply it has to dig into the OS, and I wasn't using any of its more powerful features anyway.
I've been using SizeUp for 15 years too, but I just switched to Rectangle a few months ago. Mostly because it's faster. You wouldn't think it matters, but for some reason it does.
Does anyone have any advice for making the most of the Dock? I find it pretty unhelpful coming from an older Windows / Linux background: I just want easy access to the windows that are open on my current workspace on my current monitor, and it seems ill-suited to that. I usually have it on auto-hide because it takes up space without providing much value.
I'm aware that I can do the three finger swipe to look at all of my windows, but that takes over my full screen and the previews constantly move location, so I can't build any muscle memory for it.
Really, I'm just looking for a classic, unobtrusive task switcher that lets me quickly navigate through what's on my screen without having to muddle through anything else (i.e. the Windows taskbar with all collapsing turned off)
Edit: I appreciate the suggestions about using Cmd+Tab or Raycast or Exposé or such, but I'm really just looking for a taskbar equivalent that doesn't require me to use a hotkey or switch "visual contexts". I want something that's persistent and shows the visible applications and their windows, and lets me click on them to raise them. A big part of this for me is being able to see what I have open at a glance, especially due to macOS's historically poor window management.
Edit edit: This is on me for using the words "task switcher" - that brings to mind Alt-Tab when I really meant to refer to the taskbar.
Install Alfred or Raycast and Command+Space your way to everything. Its 100x faster. I can launch any app in about 3 key strokes, which takes < 2 seconds and often less than a second with muscle memory.
For example cmd+space+c will launch or switch to chrome. cmd+space+py is pycharm, cmd+space+go is goland, cmd+space+fi is finder, cmd+space+me is messages, cmd+space+1 is 1Password. cmd+space+1p+space will start searching 1Password.
That launches apps. You can also just start doing math problems (calculator) by just cmd+space and start typing out a math equation. cmd+space+ai+space and just start asking a question to AI.
These only scratch the surface. But cmd+space, which is an easy modifier combo that you can do anytime, will basically unlock unlimited power. Once you get the muscle memory down you can literally launch any app in less than a second without even looking. If the app is already open, it just brings that app to foreground. Once you have that, you can use alt+tab to switch between apps that are already open. This is useful if you are just swapping between two or three apps for reference quickly. Furthermore alt+tilde (the squiggle key above tab and below escape on most latin keyboards) will switch between open windows of the same type. FOr example if you have 2 chrome windows open, it will switch only between those windows.
I also take this same approach on my phone. I'm on Android atm so I can use Nova Launcher for a completely blank home screen and then set a swipe gesture to bring up the search panel. On iPhone you can achieve similar by enabling removing everything from the home screen and using the app libary or search although it does look weird with the empty dock section at the bottom so I tended to just leave stuff like the browser in there.
I feel like I achieve the same app opening speed with built-in Spotlight e.g. `cmd+space me` opens Messages for me too, without any third party software
I find it superior to the dock. The applications on the task bar are persistent and only those active on the current desktop are shown. It handles multiple monitors too.
It has a few quirks I haven’t sorted out yet, but the overall experience is much closer to Windows 11.
Pro Tip: I use it conjunction with the dock by putting the dock on the side and shrinking the dock down to its smallest size and increasing the magnification effect.
The dock just annoys me. I’ve been a Mac user for almost 15 years and it has never seemed useful for me. I cmd+tab or use Alfred to switch apps. To switch between windows of one application it’s cmd+`.
Note that you can also use cmd+tab and then while continuing to hold the chord use the pointer to select an application switch to.
The main thing for me was the windows previews, I used to have hyperdock but stopped showing the windows previews. Right now I am trying DockDoor, so far is ok but you need to speed up the fade animation or it has some annoying behavior (reopens preview if pointer gets hover).
I basically use it to see which programs are open. Also when you get into macOS window hell, it can be helpful to see at a glance if anything on the dock isn't open (programs opened which are not in the dock will appear on the other side of the | )
I mean, it does work pretty similar to the windows task bar? If an application is open, it is listed there in the dock with a mark under it. You can pin applications to the dock or remove them via right clicking it. Right clicking on one will provide a list the windows which are open to which you can select from, as well as a "show all windows" option which will hide everything else, and visually show just the windows for that application (you can also just force-click on the app icon to do this).
The only difference I see is that the windows taskbar provides a preview thumbnail when hovering over the icons. In which case, there's apps you can get for that.
The big difference for me is that there is no way to quickly jump between multiple windows of the same application. I often have multiple different projects open in vscode and would love a way to switch between them without having to right-click and selecting one from the list. All I want is something like the windows taskbar with auto-grouping disabled.
> Press ⇧⌘/ to search all of the current app's menu items. Then use the Up/Down arrow keys to navigate the results and press Return to execute that menu bar action.
Kinda like command palette for every app, I like it. Would be even better if it preselected the matching option.
Unfortunately, this is broken in Firefox – they’ve bound ⌘ ? to their help page, and it opens then immediately closes the Help menu. You can rebind it to something else (e.g. ⌥ ⇧ ⌘ /) in System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → App Shortcuts → Firefox, menu title: Get Help.
One other problem is, it doesn’t always find the command I’m looking for. E.g. when I typed “dev”, it didn’t show “Web Developer Tools” at first. I then checked Tools menu (it was there), then tried typing it in the Help menu again, and sure enough, it found it this time.
I've never gotten this to work on an ISO-keyboard (chunky enter key).
It opens "Help" in every single app, even Apple's like Finder or Safari.
I've tried GB, German, US-International, and my default EurKey layout. None of them work. This shortcut always felt like an Alt+F4 prank to me.
Press ⇧⌘/ to search all of the current app's menu items. Then use the Up/Down arrow keys to navigate the results and press Return to execute that menu bar action.
Hold Option while resizing a window to resize from the center of the window.
Hold Shift while resizing a window to lock the aspect ratio.
When a window is inactive, use the Command key to interact with it without making it active.
If an app has windows in multiple spaces, click the app's Dock icon repeatedly to cycle through the spaces with that app's windows.
Quickly move the Dock to a different side of the screen by holding Shift while dragging the resize handle.
Press ⌘B to search the web for the current query.
Press ⌘⏎ or ⌘R to reveal the selected file in Finder.
Use the name: filter to only search in the filename.
Add kind:folder to only search for folder names.
Hold Command to show the path to the currently selected file.
QuickTime Player: Grab a single frame from a video by pausing on the desired frame (using the Left and Right arrow keys to navigate individual frames) and pressing ⌘C.
Photo Booth: Hold Option while taking a picture to skip the countdown. Hold Shift while taking a picture to disable the screen flash.
> Press ⇧⌘/ to search all of the current app's menu items
This is the one feature I miss most from using macos. I got used to it back when Ubuntu used unity as its DE and called it "HUD". Didn't work everywhere (looking at you, java), but a huge timesaver.
There are so many hidden/obscure keyboard shortcuts in macOS, from time to time a post with a nice collection (and usually some hidden gems) appears on the front page here.
But I always wondered if there is a place where you can find all of them, for reference.
Writing in a text field in one window while referring to another window, where the window with the text field would overlap the other window if it were frontmost.
Readit News
I can use it as an orthodox file manager (with the f keys I remember from Norton Commander). I also like using it to access remote filesystems over nfs and sftp, and also S3 buckets. It also works well with Dropbox and iCloud. There is a great sync feature to keep source and target directories synchronised. It's also good for diffing directories at a glance. It's good at managing archive files too. Plus the regex file rename feature is often handy for me - I have a few presets saved for various purposes. It's also my go-to MacOS uninstaller, as it gathers the related files.
The things I miss the most when I accidentically open a Finder window: Cut files wit CMD+X to move them (never understood this when coming from Windows), cycle the files in a folder (start on top if you reach bottom and vice versa) and the comprehensive info bar on the right for files and folders. Give it a try :)
This combination has served me well for many years.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43091466
currently have a weird situation where a bunch of folders are arranged horizontally and go beyond the right border of the window. but there is no horizontal scroll bar indicating that.
the windows xp/nt/2000 file explorer is the pinnacle of file exploring experience. basically every linux file explorer just more or less copied it - for good reason. but no - apple has to reinvent the wheel and came up with a messed up hexagon.
Nonsense default behavior, slow as heck, search barely works, keybindings are totally illogical.
It's totally unacceptable.
I don't have that, and I can't remember having done anything to stop it.
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Do you mean Cmd + Tab? Because this doesn't happen for me at all. When I click on a window, just that window is focused, but if I Alt + Tab to an app all those windows come to the front, which I find annoying too.
I use https://rectangleapp.com/ on Mac and it's great. I mostly use shortcuts Left Half and Right Half, and also Maximize (Not the fullscreen mode thank God)
Might as well recommend enabling moving windows around with by clicking anywhere on the window with a keybind just like in most Linux desktop environments https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/321918/move-window...
It doesn't happen here with any of the app currently in use: Chrome, Finder, Terminal, Outlook, or Teams.
Apple pretend to do ergonomic but their window manager is full of frustration. Using cinnamon is a breeze with everything working well as expected. Even having multi-screens and having apps in menu on the correct screen where they are located.
I usually have open multiple Firefox, console, folder, pdf windows and my life under os-x was a nightmare.
Impossible to have one bottom icon per window (I tried everything, even U-bar that was my hope is just garbage), to not have all windows of the same app open when you click on the icon like Firefox, having to do right click on the icon all the time to go from one window of console to the other, terminals having tabs and window mixed in the menu bar,...
https://imgur.com/a/mr1E2sW
Could you elaborate on that?
My tips:
- Use Alfred. Game changer. It's an immediate improvement on spotlight search, you can run commands with three keystrokes (rather than opening a terminal, just command + space, then > <cmd>), it gives clipboard history and fast append (lets you press command + c twice fast to append to clipboard, and opt + command + c to search clipboard history), and lets you make 'workflows' to make frequent tasks extremely streamlined (I use one to open LLM prompts in five LLMs, so I press command + space 'llm <prompt>' and 5 browser tabs open with the same prompt in grok, claude, chatgpt, perplexity, and (local) deepseek.
- Itsycal: an 'install and forget' calendar for your menu bar (it also uses vim keybindings to move around the calendar which is a fun yet practical easter egg)
- There's still no good window manager for macOS. Rectangle is as close as it gets, but it's not good IMO because it only works on non full size windows. (the solution is just get ninja-like with three finger swipe, and endure using the mouse/trackpad more than you'd prefer)
- Vivid for double the screen brightness
https://www.raycast.com/
I guess that’s the modern way to approach development.
https://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html
I use Magnet and it does the job well. If you're familiar with it, I'd love to know why you don't think it's a good window manager. Or do you just mean there's not a good NATIVE window manager for the OS?
So I've embraced overlapping windows. I strategically place them so that the import parts are visible. For example, my IDE is full screen, but the browser is only 70% with and height or so (so that the left 30% and the bottom 30% of the IDE are visible, which conveniently lets me peek into the log of the currently running program.
I have a Hammerspoon configuration that conjures up a modal window on a keypress, and then additional keypresses move the current window to a predefined position and size, e.g. m to maximize and p for the top right corner (70% width and 70% height).
I also have some keybindings in that modal window to jump to an app, e.g. w for the browser, i for the IDE, t for the email client, space for the terminal.
I very very rarely manually move a window around, one of the preset positions/sizes usually works for me.
Same. My eyesight getting worse has been a big factor for me. The days of having all my active tools neatly organized and visible simultaneously is over, even with multiple large monitors.
I don’t know your requirements for good, but I like Mizage’s Divvy. Works on Mac and Windows and can configure gTile similarly on Linux.
I’ve tried multiple different tools, but none really felt right - probably because I was using i3 on my desktop. And then I found aerospace, which is inspired by i3 and uses a lot of clever tricks to achieve this
So I went back to yabai. It gets the jobs done fine.
[0] https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace/issues/68
Alfred has been around for ages and I’m reasonably confident the developers aren’t going to screw me.
[0]: https://github.com/quicksilver/Quicksilver
https://www.hammerspoon.org/Spoons/MiroWindowsManager.html
https://folivora.ai/
Alfred search, in fact, really irritates me in that I've not found a good way to limit the search space. No, I really don't want files inside various node_modules folders filling up the search results. <Sigh> I'll try Spotlight, or go directory traversing, again. Anyone have a solution for that?
Spotlight search would bring up a wikipedia entry for app store instead of the app store on my laptop: https://imgur.com/QV1w7Kq
Typing 'finder' and hitting enter (e.g. to browse for a file), would open finder settings, rather than finder itself.
I haven't used it in ~1 year, those are a couple of examples I can recall.
Anyone know how to pin a window to a desktop so that it remembers this across restarts?
I settled for Cmd+Ctrl+[h|j|k|l] window snapping via Hammerspoon, and let my Arch/Hyprland box keep the tiling window manager.
It’s very much changed how I work/use my computer. More than Rectangle did, more than LLMs have.
(I still adore hookshot/rectangle though :)
As a bonus I can hit hyper-l (L for layout) and it'll open the correct apps + place them correctly depending on where I am and how many monitors are connected.
And caps-lock is of course mapped as hyper with Karabiner Elements, it even has a preset for it.
Also, I was only using Karabiner for caps remapping and was able to satisfactorily replace it with this type of built-in hidutil call: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203239 -- remaps to F19, which I use as a hyper modal in hammerspoon. Works well, and I was happy to let go of Karabiner given how deeply it has to dig into the OS, and I wasn't using any of its more powerful features anyway.
https://github.com/niklasr22/BrightIntosh
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To quickly find text, select some text and press ⌘E followed by ⌘G.
In save dialogs, press ⌘= to switch between the compact and expanded layout.
In save dialogs, press ~ to open a Go To File dialog prefilled with the home directory. Press / to open it prefilled with the root directory.
Hold Option while opening the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth menus to access extra options.
After copying a file, press ⌥⌘V to move the file instead of pasting a copy of it.
Terminal:
Press ⇧⌘A to select the output from the previous command.
Press ⌘L to clear the output from the previous command.
Press ⌃⌘V to paste and format text that is properly escaped for the shell.
Press ⌃T while a command is executing to view runtime statistics about the execution so far.
This is really nice. Once I am in this 'search' mode, I couldn't figure out how to get out of this mode.
- Edited to make question more descriptive.
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This one is very cool
I'm aware that I can do the three finger swipe to look at all of my windows, but that takes over my full screen and the previews constantly move location, so I can't build any muscle memory for it.
Really, I'm just looking for a classic, unobtrusive task switcher that lets me quickly navigate through what's on my screen without having to muddle through anything else (i.e. the Windows taskbar with all collapsing turned off)
Edit: I appreciate the suggestions about using Cmd+Tab or Raycast or Exposé or such, but I'm really just looking for a taskbar equivalent that doesn't require me to use a hotkey or switch "visual contexts". I want something that's persistent and shows the visible applications and their windows, and lets me click on them to raise them. A big part of this for me is being able to see what I have open at a glance, especially due to macOS's historically poor window management.
Edit edit: This is on me for using the words "task switcher" - that brings to mind Alt-Tab when I really meant to refer to the taskbar.
Install Alfred or Raycast and Command+Space your way to everything. Its 100x faster. I can launch any app in about 3 key strokes, which takes < 2 seconds and often less than a second with muscle memory.
For example cmd+space+c will launch or switch to chrome. cmd+space+py is pycharm, cmd+space+go is goland, cmd+space+fi is finder, cmd+space+me is messages, cmd+space+1 is 1Password. cmd+space+1p+space will start searching 1Password.
That launches apps. You can also just start doing math problems (calculator) by just cmd+space and start typing out a math equation. cmd+space+ai+space and just start asking a question to AI.
These only scratch the surface. But cmd+space, which is an easy modifier combo that you can do anytime, will basically unlock unlimited power. Once you get the muscle memory down you can literally launch any app in less than a second without even looking. If the app is already open, it just brings that app to foreground. Once you have that, you can use alt+tab to switch between apps that are already open. This is useful if you are just swapping between two or three apps for reference quickly. Furthermore alt+tilde (the squiggle key above tab and below escape on most latin keyboards) will switch between open windows of the same type. FOr example if you have 2 chrome windows open, it will switch only between those windows.
Fast enough for me.
FYI shift+cmd+space is also 1Password's quick access shortcut
I started using an app called Sidebar:
https://sidebarapp.net/
I find it superior to the dock. The applications on the task bar are persistent and only those active on the current desktop are shown. It handles multiple monitors too.
It has a few quirks I haven’t sorted out yet, but the overall experience is much closer to Windows 11.
Pro Tip: I use it conjunction with the dock by putting the dock on the side and shrinking the dock down to its smallest size and increasing the magnification effect.
Command-Tab to switch apps, Command-Space to open apps.
Why would I want the Dock?
How do you empty the trash? It's never even occurred to me... how do you get to the trash except via the dock?
https://github.com/ejbills/DockDoor/
See if that suits your needs
To swap between applications, use Cmd-Tab.
To swap between open windows of the current application you can use Cmd-Backtick.
Cmd-Tab, up arrow, arrow keys to the window you want, enter
Note that you can also use cmd+tab and then while continuing to hold the chord use the pointer to select an application switch to.
You also do things like (for example) start a drag, ⌘+tab to show running apps, then drop on an app icon without using the dock.
https://hypercritical.co/switchglass/
There's a detailed FAQ.
As others have said, CMD+Space is sufficient, just hide the dock.
The only difference I see is that the windows taskbar provides a preview thumbnail when hovering over the icons. In which case, there's apps you can get for that.
Kinda like command palette for every app, I like it. Would be even better if it preselected the matching option.
Unfortunately, this is broken in Firefox – they’ve bound ⌘ ? to their help page, and it opens then immediately closes the Help menu. You can rebind it to something else (e.g. ⌥ ⇧ ⌘ /) in System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → App Shortcuts → Firefox, menu title: Get Help.
One other problem is, it doesn’t always find the command I’m looking for. E.g. when I typed “dev”, it didn’t show “Web Developer Tools” at first. I then checked Tools menu (it was there), then tried typing it in the Help menu again, and sure enough, it found it this time.
1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1935257
https://shortcat.app
Press ⇧⌘/ to search all of the current app's menu items. Then use the Up/Down arrow keys to navigate the results and press Return to execute that menu bar action.
Hold Option while resizing a window to resize from the center of the window. Hold Shift while resizing a window to lock the aspect ratio.
When a window is inactive, use the Command key to interact with it without making it active.
If an app has windows in multiple spaces, click the app's Dock icon repeatedly to cycle through the spaces with that app's windows.
Quickly move the Dock to a different side of the screen by holding Shift while dragging the resize handle.
Press ⌘B to search the web for the current query. Press ⌘⏎ or ⌘R to reveal the selected file in Finder. Use the name: filter to only search in the filename. Add kind:folder to only search for folder names. Hold Command to show the path to the currently selected file.
QuickTime Player: Grab a single frame from a video by pausing on the desired frame (using the Left and Right arrow keys to navigate individual frames) and pressing ⌘C.
Photo Booth: Hold Option while taking a picture to skip the countdown. Hold Shift while taking a picture to disable the screen flash.
This is the one feature I miss most from using macos. I got used to it back when Ubuntu used unity as its DE and called it "HUD". Didn't work everywhere (looking at you, java), but a huge timesaver.
But I always wondered if there is a place where you can find all of them, for reference.
TIL. Amazing little hack.