It’s been a bit over 2 years since I’ve moved to a MacBook Pro as my primary ‘desktop’ machine. Overall it’s been a positive experience.
OS X has been a bit less stable for me than Linux, but a whole heck of a lot better than any version of Windows. It can run Adobe’s apps natively. And X11. And frozen-bubble2 via MacPorts. What more could I ask for? 
Well… one massively irritating ‘feature’ in MacOS is the shortcut command to switch windows, Cmd-Tab.
In Windows, KDE, Gnome, and just about every other desktop environment I can think of, Alt-Tab allows you to rapidly cycle between all open windows. With OS X, Cmd-Tab (the equivalent of Alt-Tab) cycles between applications, not windows.
This can be very annoying when you want to quickly jump back-and-forth between, say, browser windows then quickly jump to another application. Apple offers a second shortcut, Cmd-`, to cycle between windows of a single application. But when you work with multiple platforms throughout the day and you have decades of muscle memory urging you to hit Cmd-Tab, using an alternative shortcut just feels wrong.
Mac-people frequently say “just use expose” instead of keyboard shortcuts. But like so many folks I am much faster with the keyboard than with the mouse. (I even went old school with my keyboard to maximize typing speed… much to the dismay of my wife who can’t sleep over the racket.)
Fortunately, there’s a solution to this problem: a shareware program called Witch gives you task switching the way it should have been out-of-the-box.
Unfortunately, OS X doesn’t allow you to assign Cmd-Tab to third-party applications like Witch.
To overcome this limitation, you need to get two more (free) applications: Unsanity’s APE and PullTab by Raging Menace. These two apps work in concert to ‘release’ the Cmd-Tab key and allow you to assign it to a third-party app like Witch.
November 1st, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Yeah, my muscle memory works the other way, and I find myself ticked off alt-tabbing through a bunch of Firefox windows when what I really want to do is get to another application.