Tea Leaves

Today I am happy because I can again use a utility that I had been deprived of for the last few months. Liteswitch X has always been a fixture on my Macs. Originally, it provided features in a keyboard app switcher that the Dock did not. Later, I kept using it just because I was used to it. But I stopped using it when I got an Intel Mac because there was no Universal version of the Preferences panel, so I had to wean myself off of the tool.

Liteswitch does three things that I like that the native switcher does not do:

1. To move backward in the icon list, you only have to hit cmd-shift, not cmd-shift-tab or cmd-arrow. I find this convenient.

2. It has a quick key to force-kill any running app (cmd-f-f).

3. It provides custom window layering modes. The one I like brings all the windows of an application forward if I bring any of its windows forward.

I thought I would miss all three of these things, but it wasn’t too bad. The native app switcher is really not that different from LiteSwitch. I ended up really missing the last item on the list though.

With the normal Dock, if I switch to an app using cmd-tab, all of the application windows come forward. But if I pick the application in any other way, I have to tediously find all of the other application windows in order to see them. The most glaring problem here is that Exposé does not bring the all of the application windows forward, only the one I picked.

I found this single small detail to bother me tremendously in my day to day work. I must have spent and extra ten minutes each day bringing windows forward that used to be there as if by magic.

Now my life is back to normal. It’s good to not have to think about these small details.