Window Switcher : Hotkeys for Switching Between Windows

Before the graphical operating systems came along, the command line interface operating systems dominated the world. Everyone had to learn using the commands for all the different operations. Keyboard was main input device and mice were not used at all.

When graphical user interface based operating systems became popular,  users readily accepted them because now they could run multiple applications and switch across them easily. The popular Alt+Tab switcher became the favorite hotkey of the Windows users.

But now some users want a little more from the tab switcher. As a result someone has created an open-source tool called Window Switcher. It is a portable application which runs in the background and offers two hotkeys for the user. The first key is the same as the Alt+Tab, but it also adds a second key called Alt+` (back quote). This back quote symbol is usually located under the Escape key .

Windows Switcher

The Alt+Tab hotkey is used to switch through all the open windows on your PC as usual. The second hotkey Alt+` is used to switch between the different windows of the same app.

The first hotkey Alt+Tab is disabled by default and only the second hotkey Alt+` is active. In order to enable or disable the hotkeys, we can create a configuration file named window-switcher.ini. This file is located in the same folder as the window.switcher.exe.

Windows Switcher

For enabling the Alt+Tab, you have to change enable=no to enable-yes in the [switch-apps] section of the configuration file. The configuration file can be opened and edited using any plain-text editor such as Notepad++ or UltraEdit. After editing and saving this configuration file, we have to close the Window Switcher program and restart it once again. When this program restarts, it will load the new settings from the configuration file.

You can download Window Switcher from https://github.com/sigoden/window-switcher.

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