Written by: Pistos
GeoSwitch is a GeoShell plugin which makes task switching more efficient. With it, you can assign hotkeys to windows, so you can launch and switch between them by pressing hotkeys.
Rationale
If you do anything in life on more than a casual basis, you generally find ways of doing that activity more efficiently. For example, if you write by hand a lot at work, you probably have your pens and pencils at-the-ready in an organizer on your desk, or the top drawer immediately next to you, or maybe even in your shirt pocket, or wedged above your ear. If you don't write by hand a lot, you'd be like me; no such organizer or drawer, just pens scattered somewhere on your desk, which you fish for at the rare times you do need to write something. Using GeoSwitch improves the way you use your computer in a way similar to this.
It is not, in and of itself, a bad thing to click on the task bar, or to use Alt-Tab, or even to drag windows around by their titlebar. But you will probably find the following method improves your productivity and work speed by a noticeable amount.
GeoSwitch: An Example
Most avid computer users have more than just a few applications open at once. If you use, say, your e-mail, your web browser, a text document and a filesystem explorer on a regular basis, you might assign these keys, respectively: Alt-Shift-E for e-mail, Alt-Shift-W for the web, Alt-Shift-T for your document editor, and Alt-Shift-F for your filesystem explorer.
When you start your day, pressing each of these keys would launch their respective applications. Then, you might press Alt-Shift-E to switch to your e-mail program, and read an e-mail from your boss asking you to update a document, and send it back to her. You press Alt-Shift-T to switch to your document editor, and open up, edit, and save the document in question. Then you Alt-Shift-E over to your e-mail program and open up a reply to your boss' e-mail. You then Alt-Shift-F over to your filesystem, and find the document. Then, using your mouse, begin dragging the file out of the folder... but without "letting go" of the document, you Alt-Shift-E back to your e-mail program, and drop the document into your reply, thereby attaching it to your response e-mail. You then whisk off the e-mail, and pat yourself on the back, having completed your task without all the usual fuss your hands engage in when they leapfrog from keyboard, to mouse, and back again.
Understanding Windows: Titles and Classes
Every window in Windows has both a title and what is known as a "window class".
The title is exactly what appears in the titlebar of the window. For example, the title of Internet Explorer is usually the title of the webpage you are viewing as well as the words "Microsoft Internet Explorer".
The window class is a special name or label given to windows of the same kind. All Internet Explorer windows, no matter what title they bear, or what webpage they are displaying, have the window class "IEFrame". Explorer windows would have the window class "ExploreWClass".
Window titles and classes are used by GeoSwitch to identify open windows, so that it can switch to them by bringing them to the foreground and into focus.
Configuring GeoSwitch
If you are not yet familiar with editing the Windows registry, you may want to read about it first.
(more coming soon)
QuickSwitch Keys and the Cycle Non-Matching Key
GeoSwitch users often find it impractical to assign too many hotkeys, or to assign hotkeys to infrequently used applications. There are two features of GeoSwitch that solve this problem.
QuickSwitch Keys
Up to three hotkeys can be used as QuickSwitch assignment keys. Three other hotkeys are used as QuickSwitch keys. Consider a time in your work where you are using your usual set of applications, but you open some other application which you only occasionally use, such as a PDF file viewer. Your work might entail you switching back and forth between your word processor and the PDF file. With the PDF file in focus, you press one of your QuickSwitch assignment keys, which might be, say, Ctrl-Alt-F1. Once assigned, you can press your corresponding QuickSwitch key, which might be Alt-Shift-F1, and then the PDF file would be brought into view.
The QuickSwitch keys are somewhat disposable in a sense, because you can reuse them in the future. For example, suppose the next day you need to work with some other application for which you don't have a regular GeoSwitch key assigned. You can just press Ctrl-Alt-F1 again to assign your first QuickSwitch key to that application, and use Alt-Shift-F1 to switch to it. The reference to your PDF viewer is overwritten and no longer used.
The Cycle Non-Matching Key
Another useful feature for dealing with infrequently-used applications is the Cycle Non-Matching Key. Pressing it repeatedly allows you to switch between all windows which don't match any other GeoSwitch key or QuickSwitch key.
Other GeoSwitch Features
If you have multiple windows open that all match for a given GeoSwitch hotkey, then pressing that hotkey repeatedly will cycle through all the matching windows. Continuing the example above, where Alt-Shift-W is assigned to your webbrowser, if you have more than one browser window open, pressing Alt-Shift-W more than once will let you switch among those browser windows.
