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In Ubuntu 11.10 Oneric the Alt+Tab feature has changed. It now switches between applications and leaves a tiny delay or keypress before letting you switch between windows within a certain application. I like this feature, but there is one thing bugging me:

  • Is there a way to disable the raising of all windows within the same application and instead only raise the latest used?

To elaborate this more clearly: If I have 10 terminal windows open and want to switch between one of these terminals and Firefox with Alt+Tab, I end up having ten terminal windows cluttering my desktop whenever I switch back and forth. This makes it hard to read commands from Firefox while having the terminal open, since all other terminals are raised above Firefox' window.

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Yes, if you press the down arrow when you have selected the terminal in the alt+tab view, then you get previews for all terminals and can choose one. Then only that terminal is raised. The intention is to raise only the last used window when you use alt+tab, and raising all of those terminals is a confirmed bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/873082

For now, you might be interested to know that Unity 2D does not suffer from this bug, so perhaps you can switch to it for a while. While I'm at it, I'll also mention that you can now also use alt+the button above tab to switch between windows of the same type only.

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Thanks for the link! I knew about the workarounds, but it isn't that easy to tune my brain around to perform another key combo whenever I use alt+tab. Glad to hear that it's a bug. I guess I'll just live with it until it's fixed :) The alt+button above tab combo is a great idea by the way! – dragly Oct 20 '11 at 11:11
Did you try Unity 2D? It's quite nice, and it doesn't have this bug. But it will get fixed. And the next six months will be all about fixing stuff like this, minor but highly annoying bugs. Think 12.04 is going to be great. :) – Jo-Erlend Schinstad Oct 20 '11 at 21:24
Looking forward to that myself! I tried Unity 2D, but there I only got the old Alt+Tab behaviour between windows instead of applications. I don't know if that's intentional or if it's just my setup that has gotten messy after tweaking? – dragly Oct 22 '11 at 14:55

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