Alt-tab in unity only raises one window of a multi-window application

[David Benjamin]

Borrowing from OS X rather than Windows, Unity makes Alt-Tab switch by application rather than by window. However, unlike OS X, Unity only raises one window, seemingly selected at random, when you Alt-Tab to an application with multiple windows.

This makes it extremely difficult to Alt-Tab quickly between two applications when using two monitors. If I have two monitors with:

Monitor 1: Chrome + Terminal + Emacs
Monitor 2: Chrome

Now, focus the Chrome in monitor 1. Alt-Tab to the Terminal. Try to Alt-Tab back to monitor 1's Chrome. Even if the mouse is on the left half, only monitor 2's Chrome raises. This behavior makes window management very frustrating; it breaks LRU and makes it hard to flip between two windows. It's also hard to tell if anything even happened, so I lose track of what app I switched to.

[David Benjamin (davidben)]

Another case where this behavior breaks:

Say you Alt-Tab and accidentally switch to the Desktop entry. If there were multiple windows within an application hidden, it's difficult to get them all back. Alt-Tab only wants to restore one of them.

(This too is a regular source of frustration in using Unity. Could it be removed outright? Unlike every other entry in the switcher, this one is destructive and doesn't hides all windows rather than raising some. Note Apple does not have this and instead provides a far less destructive show desktop mechanism.)

[Kumbarov (kumbarov)]

When you have a multiwindow application up, you can use Alt + the button above Tab to switch between these windows.

[David Benjamin (davidben)]

You can, but that's not the point. In most systems, alt-tab naturally forms an LRU ordering, which means you can switch between two applications very quickly. This behavior means that LRU is broken on multimonitor.