Nine Circles of Shell

Hard to Find Mac Tricks

I’ve been using Macs my whole life, and consider myself pretty competent with their use. Despite the years of exposure, there are still some tricks and shortcuts that I never learned before that I’ve recently learned, and to my delight, are actually useful.

Command ` (back tick) to switch between windows within an application

TLDR: Use Command + Tab to switch between applications. Use Command +  `  to switch between the windows of an application.

If you don’t know about using Command + Tab to switch between Apps on the Mac, start using it. It is incredibly useful, and the muscle memory translates to Windows as well with its Alt + Tab combo performing a very similar function. However, people migrating from Windows to MacOS might find the particularities of the latter’s Command + Tab behavior a little strange. On Windows Alt + Tab switches through all of your windows in the order they were last viewed. With this system you might cycle through an Excel window to an outlook window and then to a different Excel window if you were to hold Alt and tap Tab repeatedly.

The difference on MacOS, though seemingly subtle, is that Command + Tab switches between running apps, not individual windows. This distinction is a result of MacOS’s general philosophy about the one to many relationship between an app and its windows (which is also the reason why closing a window on MacOS doesn’t necessarily close the app like it does on Windows). The Mac’s system might be frustrating coming from Windows because of the apparent loss of granularity it imposes. However, MacOS provides an arguably better solution: Command +  `  . Once you've used Command + Tab to switch to your desired application, it will show that app's window that last had focus. To switch to another of that app's windows, just hold the Command key like you would to use Command + Tab, but go just a little higher and hit that  ` ! This will cycle through the windows of that application in the reverse order they have been visited in. You can change the order they are cycled through by holding Shift while executing Command +  ` .

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