I’ve never liked the Mac OS X Command Tab application specific switching style… today, I found a few things to help ease the pain. The program in question is called Witch. A rather detailed, very versitile little program. Unfortunatly, you are unable to bind this to Cmd+Tab by default. But with the help of another application, plus a plugin, all is well. Go ahead and install Witch, and then go grab APE, install it, reboot :(, and then download PullTab. Open it up, and copy PullTab.ape to ~/Library/Application Enhancers/ (create this directory if it’s not there)… again, you’ll need to reboot or logout/in :(
After the song and dance of getting everything installed you can open up System Preferences. You’ll see two new items under Other. Application Enhancements, and Witch. Lets open up Application Enhancements, and make sure PullTab is enabled. Afterward, Command+Tab should no longer switch between applicatoins, and you should be able to open up the preferences for Witch. I have a very simple configuration applied. First, I checked Enable Witch. Second, I set the Forward, All Applications Trigger to Cmd+Tab (you may get a warning, just press ok). Third, under Behavior, I set ‘Sort windows by’ to window activity order.. last, but possibly most important, choose, or create a theme without transparency. Even on my ‘late 2008′ MacBook Pro 2.5 w/4GB memory the transparency option slows Witch up beyond usability when lots of window changes have been made since last invoking witch.. to me, this makes it unusable.
Who writes this crap?
Tony Mattke is a network engineer for a financial institution in Indiana. In the past he has worked for ISPs, data centers, networking manufactures, and the occasional enterprise. For feedback, please leave a comment on the article in question. For everything else including fan mail or death threats, contact him via twitter.
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"Witch" has become unusable for me. It now takes 5-10 seconds to respond to me pressing Command-Tab, or whatever key combination I assign. What is strange is that it worked fine for the first few weeks. This slow behavior persists even after restarting the computer. Anyone have any ideas? I wonder if it is perhaps trying to "phone home"…I noticed the authors website no longer exists.
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