Nilesh D Kapadia

I've always found task switching to be something that just isn't inefficient enough, and I tend to struggle with my window managers a bit to get things working the way I want them (and usually have to settle for less-than-optimal solution). I recently read a blog that pointed me to TaskSwitchXP, which is an excellent replacement for the Windows task switcher. I've always wondered why you couldn't select a task with the mouse when hitting ALT-TAB, and this allows just that. It also lists the full titlebar for each app and gives you a preview if the window isn't minimized. There's plenty of configuration options and I was able to get it to work the way I wanted.

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Now for a discussion of task switching in general:

Windows by default gives you two options for task switching: using ALT-TAB or using the taskbar. I'm the kind of person who has a lot of windows open, so ALT-TABing is only really good for when I'm switching between two different apps (going back and forth), especially with the limitations of it. So I rely on the taskbar to find the window I'm looking for. When the taskbar is docked on the bottom of the screen, it gets crowded very quickly, and I can no longer read the window title text to find what I'm looking for. So what I started doing was dock the taskbar on the right side of the screen (vertical instead of horizontal) and keep it wide enough so I can read enough of the window titles to identify the task. This worked great at 1600x1200 resolution, but I recently switched to two 1280x1024 screens at work, and it just steals too much screen real estate so I had to switch back to docking on the bottom. And its simply out of the question on a single 1024x768 screen (e.g. laptop).

In Linux things aren't perfect either. I have a 1600x1200 screen on my Linux box at home, so docking a taskbar on the side is an option, but Gnome just doesn't handle this properly, it only shows icons when I do this and doesn't allow me to stretch the taskbar to show the window titles. KDE is better about this, and I have been able to get the vertical taskbar docked on the side to work how I want it. Gnome's task-switcher interface is more like the default Windows one, but KDE allows you to click on a task to select it while you are pressing ALT-TAB. One nice thing in Linux is that I can use the old mouseover-activates-window feature that saves me a click in a lot of situations.

Mac OS X is pretty interesting in its task switching. It has the "dock" which contains shortcuts to whatever apps you place on it. These shortcuts double as a way to access applications that are already open but the window for the app is closed. You can minimize apps, but those behave differently, they show up at the end of the dock as an icon which shows you a preview of the window. There is the usual META-TAB style switching (you can also use APPLE-PLUS/MINUS to switch between same windows of the app, a feature that also exists in TaskSwitchXP). And then there is the Expose feature which shows a preview of all Windows on the screen and lets you switch to one by clicking on it. Though I own a Mac, I don't spend enough time using it to say whether I'm more efficient with it. I find the dock confusing and expose to be mostly useless, but maybe I spent enough time using OS X I'd be efficient with the dock.