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Pretty happy with spectacle overall. One thing I sorely miss from i3 however is the ability to switch focus to panes/windows/apps with the keyboard. Even something as next/prev window seems impossible on Mac (or I couldn’t work out a solution). I think you can cycle through apps(?), but not windows/panes in a logical order as far as I’m aware.



Cmd+Backtick (next to 1 key) lets you swap between windows of the same application. Is that what you're looking for?


That's as close as it gets, but it's not enough.

I mapped it to cmd-shift-right so it does go to the next window. But there's no way that I could find to map going to the previous window... So for example I might have two windows tiled side by side. I want to go cmd-shift-right to focus on the right one, and cmd-shift-left to focus on the left...


Hammerspoon can change focus by relative direction. Can be a bit iffy sometimes but between that and HyperSwitch I'm never really at a loss.


Thanks. I'm going to try Hammerspoon (and maybe HyperSwitch).

From other comments, it seems like yabai can also handle it, but it seems like a very "hard-core" way, including disabling some Mac security features, and I'm not sure I feel comfortable going that far yet :)


It's not exactly what you want, but have you tried binding "Move focus to next window" to alt+tab? Then you can use alt-tab-shift to cycle focus backwards, at least something. (I always forget where that setting is, it's in Keyboard->Shortcuts->Keyboard).


If you have two windows the order shouldn't matter?

Also, Cmd+` goes to the next window, Cmd+Shift+` goes to the previous window, your mappings having a shift in them might be the issue.


> If you have two windows the order shouldn't matter?

No. But I don't think it's too much to ask to cycle through more than two, now, is it? :)

> Also, Cmd+` goes to the next window, Cmd+Shift+` goes to the previous window, your mappings having a shift in them might be the issue.

I'm not sure I understand how having a shift in my mapping affects this, but cmd-shift-` isn't ergonomic at all. To me the arrows are far more logical way to go in a certain direction. Why can I map next window to any key, but there's no way to map another key to the previous window? I find it very strange.

For the sake of comparison, i3 makes all those things trivial.




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