Daniel's Blog

This describes a problem I experience quite often:

You’ve been using alt-tab to bounce back-and-forth between your text editor and your web browser—you’ve formed a habit. You now click over to your Twitter client to see your friend’s latest updates, click back to your text editor, type a few sentences and hit alt-tab. What happens? Because of your habit, you expect it to go to your web browser, but because the last used application was your Twitter client, that’s where it switches. That’s most likely not what you wanted. What happens next? You generally pause to think, and then use double alt-tab to switch where you wanted to go, which is your web browser. Then you hit alt-tab to switch back to your editor (habit!) and instead it goes back to Twitter. The troubled cycle repeats until MRU’s [MRU - Most Recently Used] ordered once again aligns with your habit.

It’s an interesting article, which asks more questions than giving solutions, although it provides one solution candidate.

I didn’t know that some people put that much thought into this, especially because I don’t know if this problem is solvable at all. I hold it with commenter Ralf G, who says:

The problem with your proposed solutions is the “almost always”. I don’t particularly like the current alt+tab situation (see below) but it at least behaves predictably. I think it might be possible to do what you describe IF you had deep insight into the state of apps. As an example, after you get an IM, the user switches to the Adium window 95% of the time. The problem is when behaviors aren’t well defined.

There’s also the problem that this is not a very commonly used keyboard command, as Rob points out:

Cool article but I think there is a bigger elephant in the room.
How does a user discover the alt-tab mechanism?
Alt-tab has to be the single least discoverable keystroke in personal computing.
Christ-come-to-Earth would need his mate with a BSc. in Computer Science to tell him about it.

I thought this was a very interesting read anyway.