How to switch Frontmost windows between monitors ?

[miiraheart]

I would love to be able to do the following :

If I have monitor 1 and on this monitor, I have two apps A and B, and the mac screen I have App C. I want to be able to switch all apps from monitor to mac screen and vice versa. Like this :

Screen 1 (app A and B)
Screen 2 (app C)

Then once I run the keyboard shortcut it switches like this :
Screen 1 (app C)
Screen 2 (app A and B)

and if I run the same keyboard shortcut again it would go back to :
Screen 1 (app A and B)
Screen 2 (app C)

and then let's say I opened another app :
Screen 1 (app A and B)
Screen 2 (app C and D)

It will switch them no matter what kind of app is opened :
Screen 1 (app C and D)
Screen 2 (app A and B)

Would really appreciate some help on how to do this with Keyboard Cowboy! I have tried but I don't know how to get the list of front most apps in order to switch them between monitors.

Thanks in advance !

[zenangst]

Hey @miiraheart, that's a cool idea! Right now, there's no single command that can do this, but I can definitely see how it could be useful and I might consider adding it.

Just to make sure I understand, you want to move all open windows to the next screen?

I wonder if there are any potential issues with that approach. What if you have more than two monitors? What would you expect to happen in that case?

Maybe "Shift all windows to the next monitor" would be a better option? That might work better with more than two monitors.

So with two monitors you would get:

Screen 1: A, B
Screen 2: C

**Perform Swap**

Screen 1: C
Screen 2: A, B

More monitors:

Screen 1: A (active)
Screen 2: B
Screen 3: C

**Perform swap**

Screen 1: B (active)
Screen 2: C
Screen 3: A

macOS can be a bit tricky when it comes to managing windows. You have to do a lot of manual calculations to get the windows position just right after moving them between screens.

[miiraheart]

Thank you for your response and glad you like the idea. It is indeed an important aspect if you do not want to break your workflow. Sometimes the mac screen is too small so I need to quickly switch windows to read it better or just use the apps on my mac's screen without breaking my focus.

And regarding the idea, yes that's exactly it! and I much prefer your term, "shifting" the apps would be great. I sometimes do have three monitors ( I use iPad as another monitor) so shifting the apps would be perfect way to describe it.

and just to confirm on your example, running the shortcut again would shift it again, and would love to have "Shift all windows to the previous monitor"

Screen 1: A (active)
Screen 2: B
Screen 3: C

**Perform swap**

Screen 1: B (active)
Screen 2: C
Screen 3: A

**Perform swap**

Screen 1: C (active)
Screen 2: A
Screen 3: B

and using "Shift all windows to the previous monitor" would put it back to

Screen 1: B (active)
Screen 2: C
Screen 3: A

Shift all windows to the previous monitor again :

Screen 1: A (active)
Screen 2: B
Screen 3: C

The tricky part would be if a screen does have multiple windows and if they can all be resized and in the same relative positions, to the next/previous screen.

[zenangst]

Yeah, I think we are on the same page here :)

Getting the relative position and size has been tricky. I haven't been able to perfect the current move window command to get it pixel perfect. Perhaps it is a skill issue 😆

Another tricky part is how do you decide the order of the screens?
One could think that just deciding via the X position is enough, but you might have a completely different monitor layout. What if they are stacked on top of each other 🤔

A lot of things to consider here... but with that said, it should hinder making a prototype and iterating on the functionality.

[miiraheart]

Yes I understand your concern, and funny enough,  I have the "extreme" case, I have them stacked on top of each other, the monitor and the iPad.

I have Rectangle Pro, and it has "App Next/Previous Display" and it resizes the app only to the next monitor, if I do it again, it would no longer resize it again (even if I put it back in the original screen) but here we could use the tiling feature which already exists, if it's one window then we can tile it to full screen, if two apps then it would tile them next to each other. But it's not perfect and not everyone would like that.

But Rectangle Pro would be a nice workaround ( I only mention this as I have used this before ) and just use the URI for the deeplink to position the windows, as it already uses the correct order of screens. But it is only a workaround.

But would love for this to be included in the roadmap. Meanwhile I might tinker a bit with an osascript + Rectangle and see if it can work.