Option to make the size of thumbnails proportional to the window sizes (like Mission Control)

[jli]

Is your feature suggestion related to a problem? Please describe.

My main problem with all Mac window switchers is that it often takes my brain a second to find the window that I want to switch to.

Alt-Tab's thumbnails really help with this, but it's still hard if the thumbnails aren't visually distinct from each other.

For example, let's say I have these 4 windows of various shapes and sizes:

When I use Alt-Tab, the thumbnails aren't particularly visually distinctive: they're all dark-theme windows with text. Also, the relative sizes of the thumbnails don't match the relative sizes of the actual windows:

• the thumbnails for small text editor (top-right) and medium terminal (bottom-right) are roughly the same size
• the large browser (left) and large text editor (center) are both much larger than the text editor and terminal on the right, but their thumbnails are actually smaller (I guess because the windows are tall/narrow)

Describe the solution you'd like

I think my brain would be much faster at locating the target thumbnail if the size of the thumbnails were proportional to each other in the same ratios that the actual window sizes are. In other words, if I have 1 small window and 1 large window that's 2x the width and height of the small window, the large window's thumbnail should also be 2x the width and height as the small window's thumbnail.

This is essentially like how Mission Control's "thumbnails" work:

Having an option to make the thumbnails relatively sized would make Alt-Tab feel more Mission-Control-like, except with actual keyboard support! I think this would be the holy grail of window switching for me :)

I'd be down to try implementing this myself, if you think it's a good idea. I have very little Swift experience, but I think it should be relatively straightforward?

Thanks for your work on Alt-Tab!

[lwouis]

Hi @jli

It's quite a unique and interesting idea. I've never seem a window switcher that does it this way on another OS.

An advantage of doing the current way is that content is quite uniform which means nice packing into rows. Another one is that you can see the contents of small windows better. If we show small windows really small then you can't read the contents/text at all in the switcher probably.

What i would suggest as a cheap step to do before any implementation is to do mockups. You could take situations like you've done (nicely) to illustrate above, and show how exactly you think AltTab could display things. Do this with a large variety of window sizes and ratios, and let's see how it fares compared to the existing results.

Regarding the swift implementation, it's mostly layout/packing algorithms, and AppKit UI code. The code is quite complex today because we support so many preferences/params. But you could do a first POC that simply does your approach, and only later merge that we the existing code and all its variations.

[lwouis]

Hi @jli, any update on this?

[jli]

@lwouis sorry, life got busy!

I'm still interested in this and hoping I'll have some more time in the next months to give it a try.

[turing]

Just adding that 1. I agree with the idea and 2. the suggestion to rigorously mock these ideas up is reasonable :) I should probably do the same for #2236