Add option to allow opening AltTab on every monitor

[valentinocossar]

Is your feature suggestion related to a problem? Please describe. Currently available options to open AltTab on different monitors are "Active monitor", "Monitor with mouse" and "Monitor with menu bar", but there's not an option to open AltTab on every available monitor.

Describe the solution you'd like Add the option to allow opening AltTab on every monitor.

Describe alternatives you've considered I've not considered alternative solutions or features.

[lwouis]

Hi @valentinocossar! Thanks for sharing this suggestion!

Multi-monitor support is an incredibly rich/complex thing to support. Currently AltTab has bare-minimum support. That is: it doesn't crash when you have multiple monitor, and tries to have a few useful preferences to help.

Now going from there to real, deep support is a lot of work. For instance, you suggest showing AltTab on all monitors. The ramifications run deep:

• If the monitors are similar, it seems not too hard, but what if the monitors have different resolutions or ratios (one is landscape and the other is portrait; common on programming setups). To me, to really support this, we would need per monitor preferences, so that users can customize the appearance of AltTab depending on the specifics of each monitor. Today the defaults appearance preferences are based on the characteristics of the main monitor.
• We need to find a way to display the main AltTab UI multiple times without crippling performance of the app
• Mouse interactions such as drag-and-drop from one monitor to the other, or mouse hover being mimic'ed on all monitors should be supported

Overall it's a great idea. Some research and POC is required to move forward. PR would be very welcome of course ;)

[valentinocossar]

Hi @lwouis! Thank you for the detailed answer.

I honestly didn't think it was that complex as a feature, but it would actually require a lot of work. This is also a feature that the Contexts application has available, which however has a simplified UI, as already discussed in this issue #384 .

Unfortunately, I have never developed for Apple platforms, so I don't think I can contribute to this feature, at least not at the moment.

[lwouis]

No worries! Anyone can pick up this ticket and contribute a PR. If noone volonteers, i may do it myself eventually, but as you can see there are already more than 40 tickets, and they pile up faster than i can handle them (i closed more than 300 tickets). Let's see

[flypenguin]

@lwouis to me a "first version" would be just awesome. this is honestly the thing I'm missing most. if "v1" does not have mouse/dragdrop support that would be perfectly fine. performance should be good though, that's the reason i switched to altTab :)

[mr-salty]

I took a look at #895 and that's similar to the issue I'm having, which is that sometimes I use my 32:9 monitor and sometimes I use the laptop screen (not both at once), and it's hard to find a width setting that looks good on either.

I was going to experiment with some ideas that don't involve full-blown multiple monitor preference support. Instead of max height and width, if you could supply one of them and a max aspect ratio for the alt-tab window itself, I might say something like "90% max height, 3:2 max aspect ratio" and it would look ok. I worry that might not work well for portrait vs landscape cases, although those probably suffer from the same kind of issue I'm describing already (if it's a decent width on portrait it's probably really narrow on landscape). Also, presenting this to the user in a way that's not confusing could be a challenge.

for the moment I either deal with it or just go change the preference manually... I'm usually on the 32:9 anyways, but I'm thinking of setting up a second workspace where I won't have that, so it will be a more frequent issue for me.

(overall though, I would have tossed this Mac out the window by now had I not discovered Alt-Tab!)

[broegaard]

What about only showing for the current screen, but make a keyboard shortcut to change focus to the next screen?