Work

Window switching utility VistaSwitcher replaces the boring Alt-Tab built into Windows with an incredibly useful alternative — complete with eye candy and loads of keyboard navigation options.

(Click any of the images for a closer look.)

It’s a little difficult to showcase how well this thing works with just a screenshot, but you can see the partially transparent Alt-Tab switcher window, complete with a massive preview window an easily readable window titles.

Awesome Keyboard Window Manipulation

Once you’ve brought up the Alt-Tab dialog, you can use the “S” key to select more than one window at a time — and then you can use the C, V or H keys to either Cascade, Tile Vertically or Tile Horizontally for just the windows that you’ve selected. The X key will close them, or the M key will minimise them…there’s actually a whole set of hotkeys that you can use to manipulate open windows.

Switch Between Open Instances of a Single Application

One of the few features that I’ve always been jealous of from the Mac OS X operating system is the Alt+` shortcut key that switches between open windows of a single application — and now with VistaSwitcher, I’ve got that feature on Windows. Just hit the Ctrl+Alt+Tab shortcut key combination, and you’ll be able to switch between just windows from that same process — in my case, I’m switching between open Windows Live Writer windows.

If you head into the preferences, you can re-map the “Application windows hotkey” to Alt+` and get the same feature built into Mac OS X — it will allow you to just switch between open windows of the same type.

Hit the link for the download, or check out the rest of the review over at How-To Geek. VistaSwitcher is a free download, works on Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 — but you’ll have the best luck on a system with Aero enabled, since it can take advantage of the smooth Desktop Window Manager.

VistaSwitcher [via How-To Geek]