I can’t stand Unity (Ubuntu’s default Window Manager) anymore. I’ve decided to switch to Cinnamon. So far, I’ve found it less buggy and more reliable, but there’s one thing that really bothers me. You can only alt-tab inside the current workspace.

Thankfully, there are extensions that tried to address this issue. First, I tried CoverFlow. Even though it, too, can only alt-tab inside the current workspace, it does allow you to alt-ctrl-tab to switch among all apps across all workspaces. But seriously, I don’t want to press the ctrl key. After some time poking around its source, I came up with a quick hack to achieve what I wanted. Unfortunately, Cinnamon was now crashing and restarting every so often. Thinking that my changes were the culprit, I reverted back to the original state, but the problem persisted. Apparently (according to some comments online), I’m not the only one; the plugin is a bit buggy.

That brings me to Win7 Alt-Tab 1.8. It’s not as slick as CoverFlow, but all I wanted was a very simple app switcher. This seemed to fit the bill. Just like CoverFlow, it alt-tabs within the current workspace… and after some snooping around the code, I found a quick hack to alt-tab across all apps. But it didn’t remember the most recent alt-tabbed app, so I couldn’t switch back and forth between 2 applications.

Finally, I went back to CoverFlow’s source to see how it retrieves a list of available windows and then ported it over to Win7. Now it’s able to alt tab intelligently between the most recent apps.

You can check out my code on github: https://github.com/noitcudni/cinnamon_win7_alttab.

By the way, I’m working on my own gig now. Check out http://packershack.com and let me know what you think.