Feedback/suggestion: hints to select windows by keypress

[prurph]

This is a really cool app! One feature I think would be neat is if robata displayed single-character "hints" on each window and then allowed users to select that window by pressing the corresponding key. This would make for an extremely fast keyboard-only workflow. Perhaps even a dedicated shortcut to select the previous window so you could toggle between two windows without even displaying the robata UI.

There are some apps that do the hints, but typically by putting a hint on every single element (input, button, etc), so they tend to be slow to invoke and not super ergonimic for just switching windows.

Just a thought. Keep up the god work!

[kcarnold]

Related: when open, arrow keys currently scroll pixel-wise; it would probably be more useful for arrow keys to navigate to the next window in that direction.

[emadda]

@prurph That's a good idea, I did think of something like this too.

I would like to keep the keys for the windows relatively stable - that is if you always place an editor or other window in a certain space/position, that should always get the same key.

I guess that most people have a combination of long and short lived windows.

I'd like to use muscle memory for the long lived windows, so when you are working you can switch between them without scanning for the letter overlays, even if you restart your machine and re-open all of your windows again.

Some questions:

1. Would assigning static keys to a given space/window be useful? Do you often place long lived windows in the same space/position?

2. Do you use letters or numbers for keys?

Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated.

[prurph]

@emadda thanks for the consideration. I think the stable hints could be cool, particularly for toggling between one or two windows. For my personal use, the biggest thing this would allow is switching between two different windows of the same application (usually a browser). There are many apps that let you set up shortcuts to activate a given application, and from within an application you can then cmd+` to toggle windows, but it's not very ergonomic.

1. I tend to put windows in the same spot, but not rigorously so; usually just like terminal on one monitor, IDE or editor on another, a few browser windows side-by-side on another, etc.
2. I think letters is preferable because they are easier to type. Generally if you are "context-switching" to another window, your eyes are already there, so it would be like toggle hints > immediately look where hint will be > hit letters that appear. This is very similar to hint-based navigation in similar software like the browser extensions Vimium, Surfing Keys, and Tridactyl that have hints to follow hyperlinks.

Just my two cents, but again I think the "killer feature" here would be quickly selecting among browser windows, because currently there are ways to bind specific shortcuts to app activation, but no way I'm aware of to quickly pick which window of a given app you want, without resorting to cycling through them using cmd+ (or apps that essentially wrap cmd+ and give you a popup listing all open windows of the current app for you to cycle through).