AltTab Files

AltTab 2026.2.0.437

[!WARNING] These binaries are not signed. Windows SmartScreen will warn on first run.

Verifying your download

Compare against SHA256SUMS.txt, or check the build provenance — every archive is attested to this repository and workflow:

gh attestation verify AltTab_2026.2.0.437_x64.7z --repo lokeshgovindu/AltTab

See SIGNING.md (github.com).

What's changed

• AltTab now tells you when there is a new version, and you choose which versions it offers. Settings -> General -> Updates: pick a channel, see the version you are running, and press Check Now whenever you like.

  Stable offers published releases only. Stable (delayed 1 week) offers them a week after publication, so somebody else finds the problem first. Developer also offers prereleases. Never checks at all, and nothing is contacted -- CheckForUpdates=Never. The check reads GitHub's releases first and the published manifest second, so it keeps working if one of them is unreachable.

• Hotkeys can now be recorded even when Windows claims the combination. Alt+Tab and Ctrl+Alt+Tab could not be typed into the recorder: Windows acted on them first and the box was left holding the modifiers with no key. Which meant the three combinations this application exists to provide were the three it could not record.

• Where the live preview switcher appears is now yours to choose. Settings -> Appearance -> Live preview: on another monitor when you have one, which is how it demonstrates the size and centring settings, or on this window's own monitor, which is what you want to photograph both together.

• The Settings window no longer asks about your colours every time you pick a theme. The question was not the one it appeared to be asking and could fire when you had changed nothing. Picking a theme is undone by Undo or Cancel, and Save as... is how a palette is kept.

• AltTab can now send a crash report when it crashes, and this is ON by default. UPGRADING TURNS IT ON: a settings file written before this release names no preference, so it takes the new default.

  What a report contains: the exception code, the call stack, the list of loaded modules, AltTab's version and the Windows version. What it does NOT contain: no memory dump, and therefore no window titles, no file paths and no search text. No screenshot. No machine name and no user name. Nothing at all is sent while AltTab is working -- no usage data, no counts, no heartbeat. Only a crash sends anything. To turn it off: Settings -> General -> Send crash reports -> Never, or CrashReporting=Never under [General] in AltTab.ini. With that set the crash reporter is never started, so nothing is sent and no connection is opened. See PRIVACY.md for the full detail.

• A new installation now wears the Dark palette rather than AltTab's own red, white and black. Dark is where most people end up, and it is the one palette whose accent colour is visible as the selected row's outline.

• UPGRADING CHANGES NOTHING ON SCREEN. A settings file written before this release names no theme, and such a file keeps the colours it already had -- your own if you customised them, the shipped scheme if you did not. Dark reaches new installations only.

• The help screenshots and the walkthrough video are photographed in Dark.

• Choosing a theme fills in the colour settings, so the boxes on the Fonts and Colors page always show what is actually being painted. There is no mode and no check box to reason about: the colours below are the colours in use, and a line above them says whether they still match the theme you picked.

  Your own palette lives as a named theme -- Save, Save as... and Delete, the way any editor works. It is kept in AltTabSettings.ini as its own section, so it survives every save and travels with the file if you copy it. The thirty-one built-in palettes are never overwritten, so a theme called Nord means the same colours on every machine and there is always a way back. Changing theme when your colours no longer match the one loaded asks first, with Save / Discard / Cancel, instead of quietly discarding the edits.

• All three switcher gestures are configurable now. Record any combination in the settings dialog; each one keeps its own enable check box.

  Alt+Tab, Alt+Backtick and Alt+Ctrl+Tab are only the defaults. Every hotkey needs a modifier, because the gesture is hold, tap, release. Shift means "reverse", unless the hotkey itself asks for Shift. An older INI keeps working. A custom BacktickKey is carried over to the new Alt+Backtick setting rather than being lost.

• The settings dialog has been rebuilt around eight categories, one page at a time, and everything in it is reachable without editing the INI.

  A search box that finds a setting on any page, by name or by what it does. Every setting explains itself in a tooltip. Numeric settings have spin buttons as well as their slider. "Show the real switcher" opens the actual switcher beside the dialog and follows every change as you make it, so a colour or a size can be judged before it is applied. A wheel turn scrolls the page instead of silently changing the control it passed over. The theme list is the one deliberate exception.

• An Advanced page listing every setting in the file -- name, section, type, value and default -- sortable by any column and filterable by its own search box. Settings with no control of their own are edited here, so nothing in the INI is out of reach any more. A row whose value is not the default is tinted.

• The selected row is outlined in the theme's own accent. It used to be the selection mixed towards black or white, which comes out grey: the Dark theme outlined its selection in a pale slate while the theme's accent is a bright blue. Where a palette's accent cannot be told apart from the row it outlines -- AltTab's own scheme, whose accent is the red of the matched letters -- the old outline is kept.

• Every theme means the same thing in AltTab and in AltTab.NET now. The two carried their own values for the same names, most visibly for matched letters: Nord highlighted in blue in one and in yellow in the other. The names, the colours and the selected row are all one set of values now.

• Thirty-one themes for the switcher, named by "[General] Theme".

  Default is AltTab as it has always looked, for anyone who wants it back. Light, Dark, and twenty-eight familiar palettes -- Nord, Dracula, Solarized Dark and Light, Monokai, Gruvbox Dark and Light, Zenburn, Catppuccin Mocha and Latte, Tokyo Night, One Dark, Rose Pine, Everforest, Kanagawa, GitHub Light and Dark, Ayu Dark and Mirage, Material Darker, Oceanic Next, Tomorrow Night, Horizon Dark, Selenized Dark and White, Grayscale Dark. Grayscale Dark is black and white, for anyone who finds colour noisy. It tells the matched letters from the selected row by brightness instead. Ten of them come from the tinted-theming gallery, which shows several hundred base16 schemes side by side: https://tinted-theming.github.io/tinted-gallery/ -- so a palette you know from your editor or terminal looks the same here. The help explains how to take a scheme from there into the colour settings by hand.

• The switcher window itself:

  Rounded corners ("[General] RoundedCorners"), with the system's own drop shadow when the window is opaque. Its own thin scrollbar, coloured from the list, in place of the system's 17px one -- and the mouse wheel scrolls the list, which it never did. It opens on the monitor "[General] SwitcherMonitor" names: Cursor, the ActiveWindow's, or Primary. Its size is a percentage of that monitor. It no longer shrinks while it is open, so filtering or closing a window cannot move the row you are aiming at. It still grows for a window that opens while it is up.

• The row information tooltip is a two-column table: title, path, description, version, company and process id, with blank fields left out.

  It waits for the pointer to actually move before appearing, so a switcher opened under a stationary pointer does not cover itself with a tooltip. The delay is a setting: "[MouseHover] TooltipDelayMs", default 100. It goes away by itself after 30 seconds instead of sitting there.

• Closing and terminating from the switcher:

  A closing row fades and slides out rather than vanishing. The length is "[General] RowCloseAnimationMs", default 100ms, 0 to turn it off. A window that is not responding is drawn in its own background colour, "[ListView] NotRespondingBackgroundColor". Terminate names what it is about to take when it is more than one window.

• Typing holds the switcher open. Once a keystroke becomes search text, letting go of the modifiers no longer commits the selection -- so a name can be typed at leisure and finished with Enter, a click, or Escape.

• The search box is a proper control now, in the switcher and in both settings boxes: a magnifier, and a Clear button that appears when there is text.

• The menus have icons, and the item you probably came for -- About AltTab -- is drawn bold. A checked item is bold too, with a tick on the right, so what is switched on can be seen at a glance.

• "Copy Info" on the switcher's context menu copies everything the row's tooltip shows, as lines of "Key: value" -- what to paste into a bug report.

• Disabling AltTab is visible and complete. The tray icon greys, its tooltip says "(disabled)", the menu item names what it will do, any switcher on screen closes, and a double click on the tray icon toggles it.

• The About box was redesigned: the icon, the product name as both heading and repository link, the version with the build time, and "Copy details" for a bug report. It says so when AltTab is running elevated.

• The help was rebuilt from scratch and is generated, not hand-authored. The same Markdown is what GitHub shows and what AltTab.chm is built from, and the screenshots are captured by driving the application, so they cannot go stale. There is a short animation and a one-minute walkthrough video with it.

• The version is MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH.BUILD, where BUILD is the number of commits -- so every build has its own version and nothing has to be remembered.

• The Processes page has been rebuilt. Both lists of executables -- the groups that Alt+Backtick treats as one application, and the applications to hide -- used to be one box of hand-typed text each, with "/" between the names in a group and "|" between groups.

  Groups are a list with two columns, and New / Edit / Remove beside it. Edit opens the group in its own window, the way Windows' own environment variables are edited. "From window..." lists what is running, with its icon and a window title, and you tick what you want. No more typing "xplorer2_lite.exe" from memory. "Add..." takes one or several names at once, for anything not running. An executable can only be in one group -- AltTab uses the first it finds -- and the page says so now instead of silently ignoring the second. The applications to hide have the same three buttons, on the page itself.

• Every slider says what its range is, beside its name: "Tooltip delay (ms) (0 - 5000)". A trackbar on its own says nothing about what its ends mean, and the sliders were nudged so their tracks line up with the boxes and lists above and below them.

• The Mouse page is in two sections now, Pointer and Tooltip, so the four tooltip settings sit together instead of being spread down the page.

• Ctrl+E and Ctrl+K both put the caret in the settings search box, wherever you are in the dialog, and select what is there so typing replaces it. The box says so: its cue text is "Search (Ctrl+E)" rather than a sentence that filled it.

• A group's executables are separated by semicolons where they are listed, not commas -- a comma is a legal character in a Windows file name, so "a, b.exe" could have been one name. The file itself is unchanged.

• Those two lists use the dialog's own font now. They were set in a fixed-pitch face back when they were boxes of hand-typed text, where a typo was found by column; the names are picked from a list instead now.

• The setting that bolds the tooltip's labels is now called "BoldTooltipLabels" rather than "BoldTooltipText", which stopped being true when the values got their own switch. Files written by earlier builds are read as before and are rewritten with the new name the next time anything saves, so nothing is lost.

• The row tooltip's values can be bold as well, on the Mouse page. The labels have always had that option; the values now have their own, off by default, since a two-column table reads best when only one column is heavy.

• The switcher's context menu greys out what it cannot do. With a search that matched nothing -- so no rows at all -- Close, Terminate, Close All, Terminate All, Open Path and the three Copy items were all still offered, and all did nothing when chosen.

• "Show an icon in the notification area" takes effect when you apply it. The setting was only read at start-up, so turning it off left the icon in the tray and turning it on did nothing until AltTab was restarted.

• The two lists of executables on the Processes page are a point larger. They are set in a fixed-pitch face, which reads smaller than the rest of the dialog at the same nominal size, and they are the one place meant to be read character by character.

• The process exclusion list is honoured however the switcher was opened. It was applied only to a switcher opened by a hotkey, so a click on the tray icon listed every window the list exists to hide.

• "Disable AltTab" survives a reload of AltTabSettings.ini. Reloading while disabled left the icon and the menu saying "enabled" while every hotkey stayed dead -- nothing to see, and nothing reported.

• Closing the switcher window no longer quits AltTab. A WM_CLOSE aimed at the switcher ended the whole application, with an access violation on the way out.

• AltTab's own windows are listed, under the titles they really carry. The settings dialog could not be switched to, and the one window that did get listed appeared under an internal name.

• The switcher takes the keyboard properly, and delivers its own navigation keys when Windows refuses it the foreground. Arrows and Delete did nothing until the hotkey was pressed again.

• One keystroke puts one character in the search box. Every letter arrived twice, and a typed full stop was dropped altogether.

• Scrolling sticks. The list is rebuilt ten times a second, and any scroll -- wheel or scrollbar -- was undone within a tick.

• Clicking a row's close button closes the window you clicked. A wheel turn moved the rows without redrawing the button, so it could close another window.

• A row fades only once the close was really issued, so a window belonging to an elevated process no longer appears to be going when nothing happened.

• Changing a font, a colour, the process-name column or a theme now shows in a switcher that is already on screen, instead of applying at the next opening.

• Recording a hotkey counts as a change: Apply used to stay greyed out. A half-recorded combination is explained and undone rather than saved.

• Apply lights up for every setting, not the ones somebody remembered to list.

• The tooltips are legible. All three were drawing mid-grey text on their own near-white background; they take full contrast now, in the light theme and in the dark one.

• The column header is gone from the switcher. It looked wrong under the search box, and left a band of empty space below the last row.

• Two more colours are yours to set: the outline around the selected row, and the outline around the row under the pointer. Both used to be mixed from the selection colour, which always came out grey. Keep the pointer one weaker than the selected one -- the two rows sit next to each other, and an identical outline makes the eye pick the wrong one.

• The letters your search matched can be drawn bold as well as coloured, and are by default ("[ListView] BoldMatchedText"). Weight is the one cue that does not depend on the palette: across the thirty-one themes, twenty draw the matched letters at nearly the same brightness as the title around them and one draws them at exactly the same, so on many themes the colours alone were doing very little. The band behind them is also lifted clear of the row background on the palettes where it was invisible.

• Undo, on the settings dialog, in place of Reload. It discards everything you have changed since you opened the dialog or last applied, and asks nothing first -- there is nothing to confirm about an undo, and it is greyed out whenever there is nothing to undo. It still picks up a settings file edited by hand while the dialog was open, which is what Reload was for.

• The settings search box takes the arrow keys. Up and Down walk the results or the category list without leaving the box, Page Up and Page Down move by a screenful, and Enter opens the highlighted result -- it used to save and close the dialog, throwing the search away. Ctrl+E and Ctrl+K put the caret in the box from anywhere in the dialog.

• The About box lists the licences of the software AltTab is built with, and names AltTab.NET, a .NET reimplementation in progress in the same repository. The version line carries the commit the build came from, so two builds made on the same day can be told apart in a bug report.

• The archive carries PRIVACY.md, which the notes and the settings reference both send you to by name, and AltTab's own LICENSE beside the third-party notices.

• Answering the "close all windows?" prompt with Y or N works. The keystroke went into the switcher's search box instead of the prompt, so the prompt sat there while letters appeared behind it.

• Two window-size values were read before they were ever written, so a column in the switcher could be sized from whatever happened to be on the stack. Found by running PVS-Studio over the code; four other findings were real and are fixed, and the rest were the analyser reading correct code as suspicious.

• The application icons in the help animation are the real ones. It shared one set of 256 colours across every frame, which is not enough for a dark switcher and a dozen brightly coloured icons at once -- Visual Studio's came out as flat purple bands. Each frame carries its own colours now, and the file is a fifth of the size it was.

• The help screenshots that show two windows together no longer have dark notches in their rounded corners.

• The mouse wheel now scrolls the Settings pages. Pointing at the category list and turning the wheel did nothing at all -- and that list is exactly where the pointer is after you have just clicked a category.

• Check Now used the saved update channel rather than the one on screen, so a window showing Stable could offer a prerelease.

• The Download button now fetches the version the update window just named. It had always opened the newest file on SourceForge, which was the same thing for years and stopped being so once prereleases could be offered.

• The copyright in the executable's Properties reads "Copyright (c) 2026" as intended, rather than two stray characters.

• An executable listed in two similar-process groups no longer makes Alt+Backtick collect different windows depending on which one you started from. The first group to claim a name now keeps it, and the Settings page says so.

• Hidden processes stay hidden however the switcher was opened. The exclusion list was applied only when a hotkey opened it, so the tray icon's click and the Settings preview both listed everything -- 24 rows against 5, with the same list in force.

Full commit log: https://github.com/lokeshgovindu/AltTab/compare/2026.2.0-beta1...2026.2.0