Tabs are evil, and not just in whitespace

Of the many great things that Firefox has brought us, tabbed-mode is the earliest, and arguably the greatest. Tabs existed in applications before Firefox, but I believe it was Firefox that made them mainstream. Soon, many applications started touting tabbed windows as one of their main features. Tabs were a good way to keep all "related" windows together - finding the window you needed was never easier/faster.

But now, tabs only seem to hinder my workflow. During the past few years, Firefox has grown, and so have I. However, Firefox still focusses on one task - web browsing, and I have moved on to doing things that involve more applications. When I am developing, I usually have two instances of my IDE, API documentation in Firefox, IM windows in Pidgin, and git terminals. Most of the times, I cannot reach the window I want to in a single attempt. Going back to a page I am browsing from my IDE involves Alt-Tabbing to my browser, and then Ctrl+Tabbing to the correct tab.

I seem to have found a solution to my window switching woes on Windows, although I needed two applications to get what I want. The first - TaskSwitchXP (use compatibility mode in Vista). All my applications now run in non-tabbed mode (here's an extension for Firefox to help with this). When I need to switch to between windows of all applications, I Alt+Tab to get this -

However, when I need to switch between instances of the same application, I Ctrl+Alt+Tab my way to this -

Notice that the taskbar shows many application windows open, however, the switcher only shows Firefox windows. This is very similar to Ctrl+Tabbing within an application.

Multiple windows can be a pain though, once you have too many of them. Not very uncommon while browsing. If the window is too far back on the Alt+Tab MRU list, I use the second application - this autohotkey script - to do an incremental search-as-you-type in the existing windows list. Like so -

I'm still looking for something like this on Linux - an application instance switcher, and an incremental search for all windows. The problem is somewhat mitigated through workspaces, but not completely solved, IMHO. You can group related windows on a workspace, and the window switching you have to do gets a lot lesser. But the tabbed applications still break this flow, and you can never get to the window you want directly.

Mac OS X apparently already has a shortcut to this effect.