On a Mac, you can switch between apps with Command-Tab or windows of the same app with Command-` but there's no way to cycle between all windows or bounce between to two most recently used windows.

Maybe this used to make sense when apps were single purpose but I do basically everything in a web browser or a terminal so not being able to bounce between the previously selected window(of whatever kind), as I can with Alt-Tab on linux or windows, is frustrating.

Also Command-` switches to the next window, not the previous one like I would expect.

MacOS removed subpixel antialiasing, honestly for understandable reasons, making rendering on low-ppi displays blurry, but high-ppi displays are still super expensive. I got a 32" 4k monitor(~140ppi) at Costco for $250. A >200ppi display of the same size costs 20x that amount.

For web apps, spinning them into “installed” apps (doable in both Chrome and Safari now) is the move. This unclogs your tab bar, gets rid of the pointless persistent browser chrome, and gives you the benefit of OS task management capabilities.

You can add Shift to both Command-Tab and Command-` to move in the reverse direction.

Woah, I did not know about this installable web app feature - this is a game changer. Thanks for sharing.

Also I find the default Command-` to be unintuitive, especially on non-US keyboards (` is next to left Shift for me). I remapped Command-` to Option-Tab so you only have to move your thumb.

32" 6K monitor from ASUS costs $1400, 27" 5K Dahua monitor is $500, it's not $250, but we are slowly getting there ...

Not bad! Thanks for pointing those out.

Betterdisplay is $20 or so and solves the ppi problem for the most part.

It’s the dumbest thing apple has ever done and hats off to betterdisplay dev. Best money ever spent on a desktop tool easily.

The solution is subpar, even if it's nice to have one. What windows and linux have is hinting for text and good antialiasing on vector elements. They map these those the actual hardware pixels so you won't have wobbly lines.

These don't matter as much when you have high PPI. But they're a lifeline on low PPI displays (and there are a lot of those).

I completely agree, having gone through that frustration myself a couple years ago, but it at least makes the experience sort of good enough for my backend swe usage instead of making my eyes hurt. It’s still much better on other oses on the same display, absolutely.

Most macOS keyboard commands that let you cycle between things (like windows or applications) can be "reversed" by adding the SHIFT key.

So CMD+TAB+SHIFT cycles in the opposite order of from CMD+TAB, etc.

> I do basically everything in a web browser

Then you are deliberately handicapping yourself, this isn't something you can blame on the OS. It's like complaining that a car has bad fuel economy because you always stay in first gear.

As for the displays, you are comparing apples to oranges. You can get a high DPI monitor which is smaller than 32 inches for cheap. Which is plenty of screen for the distances where DPI differences are important.

Well, I don't do everything in the browser and the terminal. I also use my IntelliJ IDEs.

But other than that? Most macOS apps are now inferior to browser-based analogs. Calendar, contacts, email, iMessage, Music, TV - they all just suck.

My experience is just the opposite. I have never encountered a cloud app which is anywhere near the best paid apps in quality. What cloud app is better at photo editing than Affinity or Photoshop? What cloud calendar is better than BusyCal? What cloud spreadsheet is better than Excel? IDE and text editor? Etc.

If you think that the purpose of OS X or Apple devices is to live in the web browser or live in the terminal, then you've been very misinformed. It's on the level of buying a motorcycle and expecting it to have a roof. And then complaining about the manufacturer. Apple stuff has worked like this for decades.

Man just give me a way to switch between only the two most recent windows using a keyboard shortcut (without requiring some janky 3rd party program). Windows-style alt-tab. It's not a big ask and would make the macOS experience go from "barely usable" to "perfectly fine."

Does Command tab not do this?

It brings up a list of applications in most recently to least recently used order, so two apps switched to/from will constantly switch places.

Not if the windows are both from the same program. Then it's a different keybind, CMD-~ which doesn't have the same priority order style as CMD-Tab. I get caught up on this constantly, to the point where I decided to stop using one Chrome window under my work profile, and one under my personal profile, just so I can have my personal browser under a different program so CMD-Tab works better.

I actually use Edge for personal stuff on my work MacBook for this exact reason. The workflow simply isn’t possible otherwise.

Is that window priority order governed by the OS or the application?

I don't recall the difficulty you mention happening with Safari.

> It brings up a list of applications

"Applications" is the problem. I want to switch between windows.

I'm using virtual desktops in FlashSpace for that. There's also a third party utility called Alt-Tab that can do that.

cmd-tab does this. what are we missing? cmd-tab, cmd-tab. terminal, browser. browser, terminal. has for years.

That switches between apps, not windows. Open two browser windows and two terminals. Try to switch between one terminal and one browser without bringing all the other windows to the fore. You can't do it.

Windows (and most Unix WMs, I don't know where it actually originated) style alt-tab maintains a stack of recent windows. So you can hit alt-tab repeatedly to swap between the two most recent, or hit alt-tab-tab-tab to bring up only the 4th most recent window, etc.

ahh sorry I didn't understand. I'm so used to cmt-tab, cmd-` but I'm not at all claiming that's "most" efficient. makes sense why people would want that. I wish Apple would "just" add a fucking checkbox somewhere for that. Seems like a thing people really want.

Use contexts app.

Are you a gnome user?

Linux Mint with Cinnamon is bliss. Or well anything else, you are absolutely spoiled for choice with Desktop Environments in Linux. There is the perfect one for everyone. At least if you use X11, wayland is still a turd.

I found the Mac Desktop absolutely unusable for any development work as it comes out of the box. You need a metric ton of third-party extensions for simple stuff like proper alt-tab support or custom shortcuts. An configuration is supper limited.

And it will get so much worse with the whole glasses ui thing.

> Linux Mint with Cinnamon is bliss.

This is one of my go-tos when I need a VM, so I’m familiar.

> I found the Mac Desktop absolutely unusable for any development work as it comes out of the box.

But why are we comparing vanilla macOS to an extreme customized Linux setup as if they’re the same thing? Why one set of rules for one platform but those criteria are suspended for Linux, where we get to assume some specific set of perfectly configured everything?

This is the hyperbole that I can’t really take seriously. Calling it “absolutely unusable” just isn’t something I can take seriously.

I understand that some people like to customize their environments to the Nth degree and can’t live without their personal set of customizations, but that’s personal preferences. Calling other platforms “absolutely unusable” or “vastly inferior” is just an exaggeration when millions of devs use them just fine.

> But why are we comparing vanilla macOS to an extreme customized Linux setup as if they’re the same thing?

Your assumption that these Linux setups are "extremely customized" is wrong. Personally, I hate configuring or customizing much at all. The appeal of Linux is that there are distros that come configured out-of-the-box pretty much as I like it, whereas MacOS and especially Windows requires configuration and constant upkeep and maintenance. (MacOS doesn't even come with a decent terminal, for starters.)

For me, my main problem with MacOS is that it's full of looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong animations that you can not disable or remove. Disabling animations (or setting them to be <10ms long) is one of the few configurations I like to do. But this is not even an option on Apple's operating systems. It's like running through molasses in a dream-- it's so damnedly and artificially slow.

What makes you say it isn't an option?

defaults write com.apple.finder DisableAllAnimations -bool true

Because there is no option to disable all animations. Despite the name, that doesn't disable all animations. (In fact, I couldn't even find an animation that does remove.)

One can not disable the animations on MacOS. I would very much like to be wrong. Please tell me I am wrong and how to disable animations, especially when swapping between desktops.

You can do that by installing FlashSpace. It reimplements the desktop management just to get rid of that stupid animation.

Apple is at this point maliciously incompetent...

I'm surprised and happy a third party solution exists for this. It's a shame a Mac requires so much third-party software to get it to a usable state. But it's a good thing supply-chain attacks are a long solved problem, and Macs can not get malware.

(For posterity: I am being sarcastic, to highlight how Apple's UX stance increases users exposure to supply chain attacks. "Macs can not get malware" is a long-standing myth.)

Unfortunately the app comes with its own limitations and weird edge cases, many of which are pretty unintuitive. It would be much nicer to simply use the native experience and disable animations.

> disable animations, especially when swapping between desktops

When I first started using a mac for dev at my current job, I tried their virtual desktops implementation as a workaround for macOS's lack of alt-tab support. That desktop switching animation is so long it's honestly really funny, I just sat there for a minute switching around and laughing my ass off in disbelief at how slow it is. Unfortunately it does also make the feature completely unusable, so we're just stuck with one desktop and a gimped alt-tab. Just an absolute usability train wreck going on over at Apple.

> But why are we comparing vanilla macOS to an extreme customized Linux setup as if they’re the same thing? Why one set of rules for one platform but those criteria are suspended for Linux, where we get to assume some specific set of perfectly configured everything?

My Linux Mint installation is actually barely customized. It absolutely works out of the box. I disabled a few animations and selected a different theme and added like three extra shortcuts but that is it. Nothing that would take more than ten minutes.

I was comparing the vanilla experience.

And yes, I should have specified that I am talking about my needs. I totally believe that the Mac Desktop might be better for the average user but that is no me.

Other OS’s handling of “alt-tab” does not make it de facto “proper”.

You are trying to use macOS like your other favorite OS(s). This is not how macOS has ever worked, and the macOS approach is more than fine for millions of people.

I doesn't matter if it is fine for millions of people if it isn't fine for me.

None of that matters when it was your poor description being corrected.

> You are absolutely spoiled for choice with Desktop Environments in Linux.

That is both a pro and a con. For someone offering tech support or writing documentation it's a pretty big negative.

> as it comes out of the box

This doesn’t seem like a fair way to evaluate MacOS given the effort involved in configuring a Linux installation

Depends how you configure it. If you like things like tiling window managers and keyboard driven computing, Linux is in a category of its own.

There are a dozen or more options for tiling systems and keyboard-driven computing on macOS. Personally, one of the reasons I use macOS over Linux is because I find it easier to create custom keyboard commands and shortcuts. It’s all doable on Linux, sure, but on macOS there are several apps that make it easy.

If you haven't used something like i3/sway/awesomewm/hyprland on the linux side you won't know what you're missing.

While there are several apps to create custom keyboard commands, only yabai+skhd come close to what's available on linux, and it's not even that close tbh.

I’ve used i3 and awesomewm and bspwm etc etc. I’d be happy to never use them again!

> I’m referring to apples to apples comparison where they’re either some standard out of the box version or when customized with available tools and mods. Comparing your highly customized Linux desktop to a completely uncustomized Mac setup with no attempt at other tools or utilities isn’t an interesting comparison because it’s not apples to apples, it’s just a statement about your current preference.

Perhaps you missed the parent's "(for power users)"?

So here's an apples-to-apples comparison: customizing Mac desktop for one's preferences compared to Linux.

I've been on Mac for 10 years because of Work. Before that I was on Linux, using the AwesomeWM tiling window manager.

I dearly miss AwesomeWM. I've tried most 3rd-party window managers for Mac, and nothing comes close to the snappiness and functionality of Linux's tiling managers like AwesomeWM. Nowadays I just use window-movers like Rectangle [1], and I feel handicapped.

The simple fact of the matter is that Mac does not allow the level of customization that Linux inherently does. MacOS' UI hooks are through the Accessibility framework, and in my user experience, it's just a slower, jankier emulation of what a more deeply integrated WM can do. As a specific example, the author of DisplayMaid [2] has complained elsewhere on HN that macOS does not provide reliable identifiers for the displays, so they had to implement their own heuristics. Side-note: for a system so inherently dockable as macbooks, it's a tragedy that I have to rely on a 3rd-party app to re-position my windows for one of my 2 regular work setups.

I'm sure Apple could implement the hooks for better WM customization, they've certainly done their few updates with Spaces and their own poor-man's tiling, but the years with no update to integration demonstrate that they consider the Accessibility hooks to be Good Enough.

[1] https://rectangleapp.com

[2] https://funk-isoft.com/display-maid.html

yabai is as close as I've seen, but yeah nothing close to awesomewm or even something like sawywm