Window switching in Gimmie

I’ve always had the same annoyance as Luis when it comes to OS X’s Dock. Namely, there is no quick way — using only the mouse and the Dock — to choose the window I want, if that window belongs to an application with more than one window open. I tend to run into this most when jumping between a bunch of Firefox windows or MS Word documents.

This happens because clicking on the application’s icon in the Dock is dumb. It blindly raises all the clicked application’s windows be in front of all other windows. Usually, I click on the application in the dock and then have to go click on the title bar of the window I really want to work with, which totally breaks my flow.

So I came up with a simple algorithm for this which works really well for me, and I put it into Gimmie. It works by doing very much the same thing as the OS X Dock for applications which are not currently in the foreground: clicking the application’s icon will bring all its windows to the front.

The difference is that clicking on an application which is already in the foreground will lower the foreground window beneath the other windows of that same application. So successive clicks will cycle through all the application’s open windows.

I’ve found it really straightforward and fast to focus in on what I’m working with in this way. I just click to raise the application, and if the most recently used window is not the one I want, I just keep clicking until the one I want is raised.

Of course, this will be rendered mostly moot when documents and people in the GimmieBar each receive more coverage and support. Clicking a thumbnail of an opened document to raise its window to the foreground is always going to be faster than going via the application icon, and this is one of the strengths of Gimmie’s presentation of first-class desktop objects.