Switch to windows faster

[lwouis]

Even if we ignore potential performance issues from #45, after the shortcut is released, the app is slow to switch focus to the target window.

In my tests (using a slow-mo camera), I see HyperSwitch has 3 frames between its UI disappearing, and the target window appearing. For AltTab, it's 10 frames. I'm assuming they use another way to request focus to the OS

Here is the current code (10ms):

app.activate(options: [.activateIgnoringOtherApps])
AXUIElementPerformAction(target!, kAXRaiseAction as CFString)

[lwouis]

I looked at other open-source projects to try to see how they do it. Amethyst uses its author's Silica library for instance. I tried:

AXUIElementSetAttributeValue(target!, NSAccessibility.Attribute.main as CFString, kCFBooleanTrue)

But it's the same speed. I'm really curious how HyperSwitch does it

[lwouis]

This ticket and a bunch of others are closed in v2 released today. Feel free to test that new version out and give feedback here! Hopefully you experience better performance, can interact with minimized windows, and interact with windows from other spaces and displays. Cheers!

[lwouis]

Actually I was benchmarking by focusing in-and-out of the System Preferences > Privacy window, which is very slow to come up on my machine for some reason. Indeed for technique introduced in v2 is faster than even the OS when you click on the Dock icon.

However, I noticed today that for Outlook which is reasonably fast to appear, the OS is faster than AltTab. So some scenarios are faster, some of slower. I will reopen as a reminder to review this issue taking these scenarios into account

[lwouis]

If I count from when the menubar starts changing to Outlook's, I count:

• AltTab: 25 frames before the Outlook window starts to appear
• HyperSwitch: 5 frames before the Outlook window starts to appear

Some observations:

• With AltTab, the window appears and is already ready: its 3 top-left circles are colored. With HyperSwitch, the window appears faster, but then takes many frames to get the 3 circles colored. I think this is the main way they achieve faster perceived performance here.
• The window disappears from top to bottom, not at once. I imagine this is implementation details of my macbook internal screen, having some kind of top-to-bottom pixel repaint process.
• The menubar starts shifting before any other UI starts changing in both cases

Here is the slowmo footage I used to compare:

Slowmo-comparison.zip

[lwouis]

I just did another series of tests. Note that, similar to previous tests above, the frames are frames on my 240 fps camera, not frames on my macbook 60 fps display.

	Finder-to-Chrome	Chrome-to-Finder	Finder-to-Outlook
AltTab	12 frames	21-23 frames	16-20 frames
HyperSwitch	16 frames	16-17 frames	31 frames

[lwouis]

Basically at this point, I think the performance is good enough. I'll close this ticket. It's useful as a reference if we want to improve on this later on, and revisit this work.