macos
I have a problem (bug?) with application switching on Lion.
I use two Spaces. Say one has Postbox open, and another has Firefox and Vim.
Vim is in the foreground, and Firefox's window is behind it.
When I Cmd+Tab from Postbox to Firefox, the space is switched correctly, but Firefox remains in the background.
If I Cmd+Tab to Firefox again, or select it in the Dock, the window comes up front normally.
The bug isn't limited to Firefox only, seen it with many apps.
What am I doing wrong?
control+F4. Cycles through the applications in that Space.
(I actually have this mapped to control+`; which I find easier to remember, being close to the cmd+`; to cycle through an application's windows.)
To change the keyboard shortcut, go to the Keyboard preferences, Keyboard Shortcuts, and Keyboard & Text Input. It's the 'Move focus to active or next window' option.
(Edit to fix the keyboard shortcuts; I didn't realise that the backtick character wasn't showing up.)
You can assign a keyboard shortcut to the "Bring All to Front" menu item from System Preferences:
The activate AppleScript command also raises all windows:
activate application (path to frontmost application as text)
If you are assigning keyboard shortcuts to opening applications, you can use scripts like this:
tell application "TextEdit"
reopen
activate
end tell
reopen opens a new default window if there are no open "default" windows, like a text editor window in TextEdit. If all default windows are minimized, reopen unminimizes one of them.
It is also possible to use AppleScript to click the "Bring All to Front" menu item:
tell application "System Events" to tell (process 1 where frontmost is true)
click menu item "Bring All to Front" of menu 1 of menu bar item "Window" of menu bar 1
end tell
Best Answer
To the original poster, you weren't doing anything wrong.
Whether it was intended as a feature or not, it is clearly a usability issue, aka a bug. The problem is that often the affected app window was left stacked on top of all other windows, not behind them. Upon switching back and forth with
SpacesMission Control, the app often gets stuck under other open windows.The finger-twisting CMD-TAB-OPTION-release fails more often than not: it either doesn't do anything differently or it is impossible to accomplish due to autorepeating keys, making it a worthless gesture.
It is definitely a bug, not a feature. Keep flipping back and forth with CMD-TAB, and the window will pop back to the top, then drop down again, erratically.
Oh, it doesn't appear to affect Spaces, so it seems to be a regression.