Tech over Tea #205 CEO And Founder Of System76 | Carl Richell

I love the idea of switching the position of the Alt and Super keys. Years ago I used Enlightenment and one of my most used hotkeys was Alt+F1-F4 to switch between desktops and I have been missing it ever since. In Cosmic Super+1-4 does the same thing and with the swapped keys it will also feel the same. I am now considering to buy the Launch keyboard just for that.

However, I disagree that Alt+Tab for window switching is terrible. It is fantastic for switching between just two windows. Yes, it does become exponentially more terrible when you go over that. But to keep the number of windows low we have virtual desktops. Therefore in my opinion Alt+Tab is the perfect complement to Super+1-4 and the key thing for the implementation would be that it only switches between windows on the current virtual desktop.

On this topic I also have a feature request:

I would love to have the option to have multiple groups of tiled windows on a single virtual desktop and the ability to switch between them with Alt+Tab.

You might argue that virtual desktops already serve the purpose of switching between groups of tiled windows. However, I can only comfortably switch between 4 of them with Super+1-4, so on my laptop where I have just one screen I would be limited to 4 sets of tiled windows.

Having this would also allow for a more natural coexistence of both floating and tiled windows on the same virtual desktop, since they would behave exactly the same in regards to window switching. I am not a fan of having floating windows always on top of tiled windows. A small visual tweak that would probably be necessary is that gaps between tiled windows show e.g. a solid black to block out the windows behind them.