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My most used applications are iterm and Google-Chrome. I usually have several other applications open in the background.

Is there a way to create keyboard shortcuts to move focus to my most used applications, namely iterm and google-chrome?

I think i3 lets you do this on Linux. I have tried several applications on Mac OS, but I was not able to do this using any of them. I even tried the automator app to create application launch services for iterm and google-chrome, and assigned keyboard shortcuts for those services from System Preferences, but that worked inconsistently and was slow. When I was inside google-chrome, pressing the keyboard shortcut to move focus to 'iterm' did not work. Not sure why.

I am just looking for some way to set up keyboard shortcuts that will let me quickly move focus to my most used applications.

The Vivandiere
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  • Have you considered just using Spaces with key commands rather than trying to persuade Cmd/Tab to do it? See https://superuser.com/a/1187552/347380 and https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/179403/85275 for some use-cases. – Tetsujin May 25 '21 at 17:25
  • @Tetsujin Is there a way to move between spaces quickly? The animation when moving between spaces makes it slow. – The Vivandiere May 25 '21 at 17:27
  • use key commands* directly to the space number, don't use swipe or any 'next space' shortcut- they are at least half the speed. [& definitely don't use fullscreen apps as they cannot be numbered… plus a million other reasons I hate them ;) *tested, you can start typing immediately by this method, by the slow method you have to wait for the anim to finish – Tetsujin May 25 '21 at 17:29
  • @Tetsujin what do you mean by 'use key commands'? – The Vivandiere May 25 '21 at 17:34
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    Read the links I provided. – Tetsujin May 25 '21 at 17:41
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    @Tetsujin awesome... exactly what I was looking for! Thanks! – The Vivandiere May 25 '21 at 18:08
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    I’m very happy with http://www.apptivateapp.com/, which is more flexible for me, I don’t need to dedicate Spaces to apps. – jimtut May 26 '21 at 00:57

1 Answers1

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Thanks to Tetsujin, this is how I have set it up.

See this link for general usage of mission control - superuser.com/a/1187552/347380

Launch Mission Control, and assign iterm to space1 and google-chrome to space2. Disable automatic reshuffling of spaces from System Preferences -> Mission Control. I also check reduce motion under System Preferences -> Accessibility -> Display

Then I enable the keyboard shortcuts for spaces from System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts -> Mission Control. I reassigned the keyboard shortcuts to be friendlier, eg. Ctrl-Alt-j and Ctrl-Alt-k for spaces 1 and 2.

And lastly, I launched terminal and did the following to speed up animation.

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO

Thus, with a quick key-combination, I can switch to my most used applications very fast.

The Vivandiere
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