Alt-tab-macos: Add option to allow opening AltTab on every monitor

[valentinocossar]

Is your feature suggestion related to a problem? Please describe.
Currently available options to open AltTab on different monitors are "Active monitor", "Monitor with mouse" and "Monitor with menu bar", but there's not an option to open AltTab on every available monitor.

Describe the solution you'd like
Add the option to allow opening AltTab on every monitor.

Describe alternatives you've considered
I've not considered alternative solutions or features.

[lwouis]

Hi @valentinocossar! Thanks for sharing this suggestion!

Multi-monitor support is an incredibly rich/complex thing to support. Currently AltTab has bare-minimum support. That is: it doesn't crash when you have multiple monitor, and tries to have a few useful preferences to help.

Now going from there to real, deep support is a lot of work. For instance, you suggest showing AltTab on all monitors. The ramifications run deep:

• If the monitors are similar, it seems not too hard, but what if the monitors have different resolutions or ratios (one is landscape and the other is portrait; common on programming setups). To me, to really support this, we would need per monitor preferences, so that users can customize the appearance of AltTab depending on the specifics of each monitor. Today the defaults appearance preferences are based on the characteristics of the main monitor.
• We need to find a way to display the main AltTab UI multiple times without crippling performance of the app
• Mouse interactions such as drag-and-drop from one monitor to the other, or mouse hover being mimic'ed on all monitors should be supported

Overall it's a great idea. Some research and POC is required to move forward. PR would be very welcome of course ;)

[valentinocossar]

Hi @lwouis! Thank you for the detailed answer.

I honestly didn't think it was that complex as a feature, but it would actually require a lot of work. This is also a feature that the Contexts application has available, which however has a simplified UI, as already discussed in this issue #384 .

Unfortunately, I have never developed for Apple platforms, so I don't think I can contribute to this feature, at least not at the moment.

[lwouis]

No worries! Anyone can pick up this ticket and contribute a PR. If noone volonteers, i may do it myself eventually, but as you can see there are already more than 40 tickets, and they pile up faster than i can handle them (i closed more than 300 tickets). Let's see