Making the plain application keys focus an existing window was the
wrong call. It reads well in a demo and it is what macOS does, but it
made "give me another terminal" the awkward case -- and on a tiling
desktop a second terminal beside the first is the normal way to work,
not an edge case. Reaching for the launcher to open a second file
manager is not an improvement on anything.
So the plain keys do what they always did, and SUPER+ALT is the new
capability rather than a tax on the old one: go to the terminal,
editor, browser, files, calculator or mail you already have, wherever
it is, and start one only if there is none.
ALT rather than SHIFT because SUPER+SHIFT is already the
window-manipulation space -- Files, Neovim and Settings would have
collided with Focus session, Taller and Shorter, and breaking two keys
out of the eight-key resize set to make room is the worse trade.
Also fixes a real trap found while using it. The Alt-Tab overlay
commits on SUPER release, which is a compositor bind running an IPC
call; if that call ever fails to land, the overlay stayed up with no
keyboard focus, no Escape handler and nothing clickable, so the only
way out was an IPC call typed into a terminal it was covering. Clicking
outside now dismisses it, clicking a row switches to that window --
which is the obvious thing to try and did nothing -- and an abandoned
switch closes itself after ten seconds. Keyboard focus still stays with
the compositor, because taking it mid-switch is what would break
stepping.
Super+Tab already cycled windows, but nothing was drawn, so you chose
blind and could only confirm the choice by arriving. A visible switcher
is muscle memory for anyone arriving from macOS or GNOME, and it was the
last item of roadmap phase 03 that did not need coordination.
Ordered most-recently-used, not by creation, because that is what makes
the gesture useful: one Tab returns to the window you just came from.
Hyprland does not report an MRU order, so it is tracked from focus
changes and keyed by address, which is the only property stable for a
window's lifetime.
The gesture needs three binds rather than two. Tab steps the selection,
and the switch is committed on Super RELEASE -- the only way the
compositor can say the gesture is over. That bind is on the bare
modifier, so it fires on every Super release in the session; commit()
returns immediately when nothing is open, which is what makes it
affordable.
A list of names rather than thumbnails: at a glance you are looking for
"the other terminal", and a row of live previews is slower to read and
far more expensive to draw than this gesture deserves.
The interesting part is the bug. The overlay was built, mapped nothing,
and logged absolutely nothing -- because it declared `required property
var screen` while Variants supplies `modelData`. shell.qml has carried a
comment warning about exactly this since the Bar hit it, and I read that
comment earlier in the same session and still walked into it. A comment
that does not stop the person who read it is an argument for a test, so
per-screen-surface-contract now checks every per-screen delegate takes
its screen from modelData. Verified it catches the exact mistake.
Also fixes a regression from 8be3fc2: settings-pages-contract still
required vitalsIntervalMs on Home, where it no longer is. That contract
was pinning the split-across-two-pages arrangement the same commit
fixed, and I pushed without running it.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Gabriel Brown