Seeing the video and reading the description "Bring Browser-like Tabs to Windows Apps" greatly misled my expectations. In general, I never use the mouse for switching applications/tabs/etc, I just rely on alt-tab/ctrl-tab, and the like. To me, "browser-like tabs" means when I hit alt-tab in Windows, I only see a couple entries for Chrome, one for each tab set, and makes getting between my browser (which probably has a half dozen different random things open at any time) and my work (a couple Visual Studio instances and some output viewer, usually) super simple. I was very disappointed, with Groupy, after grouping up all of the misc windows I had open to press alt-tab, and see things looking exactly as cluttered as they were before . It seems Groupy almost exclusively improves your navigational experience if you're clicking between apps, and not when primarily using the keyboard.
I did see there's a hotkey for switching between Groupy'd apps, so I decided to at least try grouping my 3 primary work windows (2 Visual Studio instances and one remote viewing window where I could watch the hardware my project was being deployed on). I found using Win+~ moderately helpful in this case, as it at least let me deterministicly switch between these 3 windows, but was not a huge benefit, and I found no real benefit in grouping anything else so far.
However, that's when I discovered the most wonderful "feature" of Groupy. I'm pretty certain this is a "side-effect", and not a feature, but it changed my workflow so significantly I purchased a license immediately. The situation is this: I execute "Debug" in Visual Studio, and then I immediately switch focus to another app which lets me view the output of the task I'm running (usually a remote viewer for a console, or an image viewer if the output of the task I'm running is an image file, or whatever), and, without fail, when Visual Studio finishes compiling and launches my program (even if launching remotely on a different system), it rudely yanks Visual Studio's window to the top, and I have to Alt-Tab twice to be able to see the app that is in focus. SO annoying. Maybe there's some way to disable that in Visual Studio, but that's not for this discussion. However, when these apps are Groupy'd together, Visual Studio stays in the background, leaving me to test my program in peace! Wow. Never realized how much that annoyed me until it stopped happening .
I hate applications that steal the focus or the top window. Did you enable the 'Only show a taskbar button for the active window in a group' option? I use Groupy for autogrouping PowerShell and the likes, and I see only one PowerShell icon in both the taskbar and the Alt-Tab with this option enabled.
Huh, I never saw that option, it seems incredibly well hidden and for some reason not on by default? I just did a quick try of it now, and it does seem to make Groupy act much more like advertised! I'll leave that on and give grouping things another try, thanks.
Hmm, I've been trying this option for a while, but in the occasions when I *am* using the mouse to switch between programs, it makes things very difficult - I sometimes click on my pinned Visual Studio icon on the task bar, and, depending on the tab focus in a Group I cannot currently see, it either activates my working environment, or mistakenly launches a new Visual Studio instance, which takes quite a while, and, since my project is already open, involves having to click through a few dialogs before I can even close it, which is more than enough disruptive to make up for the other benefits of Groupy in that mode. If there was a way to make it just one window in Alt-Tab, but still get individual taskbar icons, that would probably be perfect for my uses.
In case of a bad install do a PURGE reboot and reinstall and report back here , Please
Purge Link: https://forums.stardock.com/488142/groupy-support-faq#reinstalling
Huh? No bad install, everything is working as designed, as far as I know.
If you still have the problem do reply 4
I still have the "problem", as described earlier, but I think it's just a problem in the design of Groupy, so I'll probably just not use it, other than for the side effect of preventing the Visual Studio window from bringing itself to the top . If there's any way to separate out the "Only show a taskbar button for active windows in a group" option from only having an alt-tab entry for the active window in a group, that would be great and probably help with my primary complaint.
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