Workspace-isolated Alt+Tab for COSMIC

The whole walkthrough, five minutes on a real COSMIC desktop: hold Alt, tap Tab, type to filter, close from the card.

Hold Alt, tap Tab: an overlay lists the current workspace's windows, most recently used first — each row its application's themed icon beside its title. Release Alt to switch; Enter confirms without releasing; Escape dismisses; a tap released before the overlay appears still switches.

What the list shows

• Workspace isolation — plain Alt+Tab reaches only the current workspace's windows; a workspace can opt into the global list (Settings)
• All-windows mode — Alt+Esc opens the same card over every workspace's windows, grouped by workspace with yours first; Alt+Shift+Esc steps it backwards
• Type to filter — while the card is up, typing narrows it by title or app name, case-insensitive; works in every mode
• Workspace label — show_workspace = true names the workspace you pressed on, the anchor for workspaces opted out of isolation

Sticky windows appear on every workspace; minimized windows nowhere; one Alt+Esc press reaches any window regardless of the rules.

Choosing and closing

• Direct access — Ctrl+N (1–9, keypad included) switches to the Nth window at once, like a click; each row shows its digit
• App cycling — Alt+` (the key above Tab) cycles the current application's windows; Alt+Shift+` steps backwards
• Quick-toggle — airlock quick-toggle flips to the second-most-recent window without an overlay; no default key — bind it in Settings → Input → Keyboard → Shortcuts → Custom
• Close from the card — Alt+- closes the selected row's window and the card stays up; hovering a row reveals a × badge that closes on click
• Pointer input — hover moves the selection, click switches, the wheel steps; the pointing-hand cursor marks every click target

Layout and appearance

• App grouping — the list becomes a per-app tree: collapsed app entries commit their most recently used window, → expands one and ← collapses it; on the horizontal band the selected tile opens its run in place
• Horizontal layout — layout = "horizontal" lays the same list out as a wide strip of icon-only tiles under one caption naming what release would activate
• Card sizing — a long list never grows the card (rows stay in view, 8 by default, … marking the truncated edges); columns and width/min-width fit the strip to the screen
• Fonts — titles render in the desktop's interface font, accents, CJK and emoji included, at 12 logical px by default; font and font_size override

Every key, pointer rule, the frozen-list rule, and the card's measurements: how the switcher behaves.

Measured on hardware on 2026-11-02 (method: hardware checklist).

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/l1br3-io/cosmic-ext-airlock/main/scripts/install.sh | sh

Requires a COSMIC Epoch desktop session. The script downloads the prebuilt x86_64 binary, verifies its sha256, installs it into a directory on your PATH, and runs airlock install, with no sudo. The keybinds hold the binary's absolute path, so the switcher works the moment install finishes. If that directory is not on PATH, it appends an export line to ~/.bashrc and ~/.profile (zsh: ~/.zshrc; fish: it prints the fish_add_path line) so typing airlock in a new terminal works. To read it first, save the file, inspect it, then run it; with AIRLOCK_NO_INTEGRATION=1 it installs the binary alone, and AIRLOCK_NO_MODIFY_PATH=1 prints the PATH line instead of appending it.