What’s the difference between Super+Tab and Alt+Tab on Gnome

alt-tabgnome3workspaces

I'm on Manjaro Gnome 3.28.3.

For my situation, they do same thing, list thumbnails of all opened applications and if you press Super or Alt, Tab could help you to switch the applications.

So, I want SuperTab and AltTab to do different things. Like SuperTab switch applications only on this workspace?

Best Answer

By default, they appear to both be assigned to “Switch applications”. They can be re-assigned using the keyboard preferences:

  1. Open the menu in the top-right-hand corner of your main screen.
  2. Click on the “Settings button”, i.e. the left-most button here:

    GNOME buttons

  3. Choose “Devices” in the left-hand column:

    Screenshot of the settings window, showing “Devices” selected

  4. Choose “Keyboard”.

This will lead you to a list of supported keyboard shortcuts, with their assigned keys; you can click on any entry to change it:

Screenshot of the settings window, showing the keyboard shortcuts

The “Switch applications” entry is somewhat strange: it only shows SuperTab, but it is also assigned to AltTab and will be disabled if you re-assign the latter. However it can then be re-assigned to whatever you want. As you can see, I use SuperTab to switch applications, AltTab to switch windows, and CtrlSuperTab to switch windows inside an application.

You can assign nearly any key to any of the supported shortcuts, but you can’t add new shortcuts.

On my system, running GNOME 3.26, “Switch windows“ only shows windows on the current workspace:

Screenshot of the window switcher

whereas “Switch applications” shows all applications across all workspaces:

Screenshot of the application switcher

Note that GNOME Tweaks has an “Alternatetab” extension which can also be used to adjust the behaviour of the window switcher.