App-focused versus window-focused navigation

October 25, 2023 5:04 PM

Is it possible to make the Windows 11 Taskbar behave more like the Macintosh Dock? Are there keystrokes I can use to cycle through the windows of a single application, rather than cycling through all open windows?

I have recently started using a Windows 11 computer at work, after many decades as a Macintosh user. I am getting used to it, but there are still a couple of things that slow me down regularly.

1. When I click on an application in the Dock, the Macintosh brings that application and all of its windows to the front, maintaining z-order. So the frontmost window of that application becomes the frontmost window on my computer screen. When I click on an application in the Taskbar, Windows shows me little thumbnails of all the windows open in that application, sorted maybe chronologically but not in z-order, and I have to squint at them and figure out which is the thumbnail that I want to select. Then I move my mouse to that thumbnail and click again. I can hover over the thumbnails and they get big so I can see them better, but it's still a multi-step process that involves multiple perceptions and decisions instead of just a single click.

2. I know that I can cycle through my open windows in Windows by using alt-tab and alt-shift-tab. But is there a way to cycle through all of the windows of a single application, e.g. all of my MS Word windows, or all of my Chrome windows? (On the Macintosh, I can cycle through all my applications with command-tab / command-shift tab, and I can cycle through the windows of a single application with command-` / command-shift-`.)

I expect Windows users probably think it is silly of me to want to do these things, but switching between windows these ways is very engrained in my work flow. For example, I may be writing in a Word document and collecting information from web pages, but I also have some other Word Documents and other Chrome windows open that I'm not using. When I click on Word in the Taskbar, I just want to go back to the Word document I've been working on. I don't want to have to figure out which one it is by the shape of the text every time.

If there is some other approach I should be taking that will make this all "really great and you just need to take Windows on its own terms" I'd be happy to hear about that as well. Right now it feels broken and frustrating.

posted by Winnie the Proust to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Not much to contribute to this beyond noting that holding down Alt and pressing Tab just once will always select the second most recently active window. So if you release Alt between Alt-Tab keystrokes, Windows ping-pongs between the two most recently active windows rather than cycling through the whole stack as it does when Alt stays down. That nicely covers the use case of accumulating Web info into a Word document for me.
posted by flabdablet at 5:27 PM on October 25, 2023

You could create a new desktop and keep all your Word windows there. Try [Windows Key]-[Tab] and you'll see the option for it.
posted by SNACKeR at 7:23 PM on October 25, 2023

This superuser.com question might have some useful answers (maybe the ones with autohotkey scripts).

Besides using virtual desktops - which are really great and useful - like SNACKer suggests, you might also get some use out of the shortcuts for making windows snap to specific portions of the screen (usually halves, but you can choose different layouts) if you need to do a lot of switching between two windows.
posted by trig at 7:45 PM on October 25, 2023

It's app dependent.

Alt-F6 is the keyboard shortcut for doing this in most office products. Ctrl-Tab works for some others, like Chrome and Edge.
posted by mark k at 10:49 PM on October 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Best answer: When I click on Word in the Taskbar, I just want to go back to the Word document I've been working on

This is called the "last active window" and I also need Windows to do this.

You can change the default behaviour so that Windows opens the last active window instead of displaying all the windows by making a small change to the registry: https://www.makeuseof.com/windows-last-active-click-taskbar/

(According to that article you can also just hold CTRL when you click the icon, but I've never tried that and as I've implemented that registry change I can't test it. But if that works, that would be a simple fix too)
posted by underclocked at 12:22 AM on October 26, 2023 [4 favorites]

You can also replace ALT-TAB with an alternative like Switcheroo:

https://www.softpedia.com/get/System/OS-Enhancements/Switcheroo-Regin-Larsen.shtml
posted by kschang at 6:49 PM on October 26, 2023

Response by poster: Underclocked's suggestion works great. I wasn't able to make the registry change because of the way my work laptop is locked down, but it's easy enough to hold down the control key. The bonus functionality is that subsequent control-clicks cycle through all of the windows of that app, so it satisfies my other request, too. I can now be much more productive at work. Thank you.

(The other thing I learned in this process is that apparently a lot of Windows users don't use multiple windows per app. Within one app they just put everything in tabs of a single window. If this is how you work, you never run into the problems I was having.)
posted by Winnie the Proust at 10:07 AM on October 30, 2023 [1 favorite]