Command-Tab / Alt-Tab Is the Best Keyboard Shortcut Ever

One of my favorite party tricks is switching between windows and tabs without touching the mouse. “Whoa, whoa, hold on. How did you do that?” is the inevitable interjection, six times out of seven. There is often pointing at my computer screen, mouths agape.

Because I’m feeling in a helpful mood (my new laptop, an Acer, is having serious hard drive problems, perhaps because I had too many windows open) I’ll share my secret:

If you’re on a Windows computer, hold down the Alt key and press the Tab key. If you’re on a Mac, hold down the “Command” key and press the Tab key. And to switch between windows within the same program on a Mac, hold down the “Command” key and press the ~ key, above the Tab key.

To switch between tabs within a browser, you just hold down the “Control” (or Ctrl) key and press the Tab key.

Before the rise of the operating system, no one needed to switch between windows. You had a command line and a linear, scroll-based interface. But since the release of Microsoft Windows 1.0, the Alt-Tab key combination to switch between windows has been present in all versions of Windows. It would later be incorporated in Mac and Unix OSes. An extensive guide to the use and behavior of Alt-Tab can be found at Wikipedia.

If you’re a regular computer user and you use a keyboard, you probably should have already known about this. If you didn’t, let’s just pretend we never had this conversation, and continue about our days, switching effortlessly between tabs and windows like zen masters for whom a new window is a portal into a new world and an infinite number of windows are possible without breaking your machine.

Read more tips in our ongoing Hack This column. And see the first in a series called CMD & CTRL, with Tim Wu.