I have a related question on SU that is asking for any tools which apply this concept:
Suppose that I've got a perfectly reasonable set of two terminal windows, two web browsers, and one email client open, all visible at the same time, on my computer which is driving three displays.
Using the computer this way for even a short amount of time reveals some serious deficiencies in the functionality of the Alt+Tab style switcher. The issue is described quite well in this article, however I am proposing a different solution to the problem than the one proposed by that article.
Before I start describing that though, I will mention that in this workflow I have described above with 5 windows, on an OS X machine I'll be switching between 3 applications with CmdTab since OS X will collapse the browser and terminal windows into their respective apps but the same problem with the Most-Recently-Used ordering in the switcher is present.
My idea is one that tiling window managers have already applied. It is directional/positional switching. I would want a set of 4 hotkeys that perform the actions, for example
Alt+Shift+←: switch to the app positioned to the left
Alt+Shift+→: switch to the app positioned to the right
Alt+Shift+↑: switch to the app positioned above
Alt+Shift+↓: switch to the app positioned below
The problem, of course, is in the ambiguity of defining which windows/apps are valid options for switching to. For a tiling manager this is pretty straightforward but it is obviously less so for a regular window manager.
I find it curious that Windows 7 gives us Win+← and Win+→ for manipulating the active window into half-screen "slots", but does not provide a way to actually switch between these windows in the same way, even for switching only among those windows which were snapped into the slots.
I guess in summary my question is would this position-aware method of switching apps be an improvement to the existing switching shortcuts?
provided that the new shortcuts do not interfere with existing shortcuts. I don't see any reason why we have to actually resort to using a tiling window manager to gain this particularly productivity-enhancing aspect of them.