Exposé’s built-in window switcher
Did you know that Exposé has a built-in window switcher?
I didn’t. The details are buried down at the bottom of Apple’s Exposé web page 
where I missed it.
Activate Exposé and then hit the Tab key. It will bring all the active windows to the front app by app.
Here it is helping me to choose which Safari window to jump to:
How useful this is to you will depend, I guess, on your workflow, whether the normal ⌘-Tab is enough for you and whether or not you already use Peter Maurer’s excellent Witch window switching app:
Still, clever!
Tags: Apple, Apple Mail Tips, expose, Mac OS X, Productivity, window switchingRelated posts
November 5th, 2006 at 10:01 pm
I don’t quite get all that buzz around some missing app-/window-switcher-thing in Mac OS X. The OS itself has everything you might need, without installing any third-party app. Switching apps is easily done by invoking Exposé or Command+Tab, as you mentioned. To switch between windows of a single application, you can always use Command+> and Command+
November 5th, 2006 at 10:23 pm
I think of it like this. Suppose, for example, I have six or seven Photoshop windows open, getting screenshots ready for a burst of blog posts.
⌘-Tab only takes me to Photoshop, not to the actual window I want. Witch lists each of the windows by title and Tab in Exposé shows me all the windows. Either way, I can pick the one I want faster.
I like Witch because titles are more useful than thumbnails for lots of open text files in the same app, and there’s a lot of word-processing in my life.
But, each to their own. The main thing is to find a way to work as efficiently as you can, so that you can stop working and do something else instead :)
November 5th, 2006 at 11:21 pm
What a lot of people don’t know is if you use command+tab you don’t have to rotate through all the open apps by recursively hitting the tab key. Just use the cursor to point to the app you want to bring to the front.
November 6th, 2006 at 3:16 am
Interesting tip! I didn’t know about this one.
With command-TAB, you can also use SHIFT+Commmand-TAB to go backward through the icons. Also, you can let up on the TAB (still holding Command) and press Q to quit, or M to minimize, etc.
Finally, pressing Command-` (where the tilde ~ is on US keyboards).
Bot
November 6th, 2006 at 5:52 am
You can also use the arrow keys to scroll through the currently selected application’s windows in Expose, so you can select which window you want without using the mouse.
November 6th, 2006 at 10:33 am
Hold Command, hit TAB, then you can scroll left and right through the icons using the left and right cursor keys. When you get to the one you want, release the command key and voilá.
November 6th, 2006 at 10:47 am
Pressing F10 in a single app (or even F9 to display all windows in all apps) displays the titles when you hover over a window. I haven’t used Witch, but Expose does everything I could ever ask of it.
November 6th, 2006 at 11:23 am
[...] Hawk Wings: “Did you know that Exposé has a built-in window switcher? [...]
November 6th, 2006 at 7:20 pm
What I actually miss, is the ability for Exposé to display all windows - even if the app is hidden. I am a sucker for an uncluttered view and use the Apple-H shortcut a lot. But this also hides the windows from Exposé…
November 7th, 2006 at 12:39 am
That screenshot looks like “Witch” is installed. Check your preference panes.
November 7th, 2006 at 1:05 am
FWIW, with full keyboard access on, control-F4 will cycle through all visible Windows in all apps. Control-shift-F4 will cycle in reverse.
November 11th, 2006 at 9:40 am
witch is OK but I like Lite Switch X better. It has a lot of options and is highly configurable.
I have no connection to Proteron :-)