There’s no such thing. You command-tab to an application, which can have many or no windows. The different mental model is probably the reason for your frustration.
Tomato Tomato. As another person clarified, I'm probably trying to switch to the most recent window of a given application. For all practical purposes, the window and the application are the same thing. There may be additional windows of that app, but they are all that app.
> For all practical purposes, the window and the application are the same thing
Not at all. That's a very unique thing about the Mac that trips Windows people. It's a subtle but crucial difference, unless you grasp it, you'll always be a bit lost on the Mac, as I am when I use Windows.
On the Mac, for instance, Photoshop can be frontmost and have no windows, panels, while you're seeing your whole desktop. The only hint you have is the menu on the top left. Photoshop on Windows covers your whole screen all the time when it's frontmost. If you think that's tomato tomato, you haven't understood the difference.
Eh I think the model they implemented makes sense. You are confusing the window of an application with the application itself.
Cmd + Tab switches between applications, or windows. If you had multiple windows of an application like Safari open but minimized to the dock, maybe you are switching to Safari the application and then opening a new window? I believe there is a command that actually pulls up the windows individually as well? Maybe CMD + 1 or something similar?
Personally I think this route is the most intuitive and makes the most sense to me, but I can empathize with your frustration. Kind of related but I generally feel annoyed whenever I use Windows for anything. It’s very unintuitive for me.
I recently switched to a Mac and overall the OS is superior to Windows, but Windows and Linux handling of windows just makes more sense in my mind. If you have 3 windows you are cycling through, composed of 1 Excel spreadsheet and 2 browser windows, it's very nice to just keep track in your mind of whether the window you want is the most recent in your "history" of windows or 2 ago, and hit Alt+Tab as needed. In the Mac world you have to switch between Cmd+Tab and Cmd+` depending on which you want to reach and where you're starting from, and that just seems like an unnecessary split to think about.
There’s no such thing. You command-tab to an application, which can have many or no windows. The different mental model is probably the reason for your frustration.