TaskSwitchXP

Friday 30 December 2005 — This is close to 19 years old. Be careful.

There are a lot of add-ons for Windows that offer window management, or shell extensions, or task launching. Many of these look great in the screenshots, but then I try them, and am disappointed. They end up being flaky or slow or just awkward. TaskSwitchXP is not one of these. It is a replacement for the Alt-Tab behavior in Windows for switching among running programs. It provides thumbnails of the applications, and a nicer UI for the icons, and lets me just click on the icon I want when I see it. It does just what I want, in a competent unobtrusive way.

Comments

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Clint 12:11 PM on 30 Dec 2005
awesome! thanks. and, happy new year!
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Jeff Atwood 5:43 PM on 30 Dec 2005
I like it too-- but I got a lot of "it's too slow!" resistance when I posted about it, which surprised me:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000411.html
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Len Holgate 7:01 PM on 30 Dec 2005
Jeff, I found it too slow, the switching just wasn't fluid enough (or occasionally it missed a switch, I'm not quite sure which) and I have a nice beefy dual proc box that does everything else just fine. It's the 'alt tab' switch to see window 1, followed really quickly by another 'alt tab' switch back to the window I was last on, thing that just didn't work for me.... I really tried to like it but it just didn't do it for me...
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Dennis Doughty 8:53 PM on 30 Dec 2005
Definitely too slow for me. Perhaps I'd get used to it but I didn't give it the chance.
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Andy Todd 5:38 PM on 2 Jan 2006
Thanks for the heads up Ned, it's a keeper. And a happy New Year to you and yours.

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