I haven't been able to find a key binding program or recipe that supports this kind of interaction (I'm currently using sxhkd). There is a further improvement I'd love to add but don't know how - I want the Windows Alt-Tab behavior where Alt-Tab enters a 'switching mode' and then as long as Alt is held down, repeated tapping of Tab fires an action (in this case, cycling focus to older and older targets). I'm quite happy with the result (though there are still some bugs involving tracking workspace age while shifting them around between outputs). The next improvement was to make toggling only consider workspaces currently on the focused output. This immediately drove me up a wall by jumping to workspaces on different outputs (laptop screen, external monitor, etc) which was correct but remarkably disorienting. I wrote a small thing to help me manage creation and navigation of named i3 workspaces using dmenu (and I love it) but the first improvement I made was to add the ability to flip between the two most recently used workspaces and bind it to Alt-Tab. I use the tiling window manager i3 - so I don't have windows stacked on top of each other to flip through, but I do have plenty of workspaces to flip through. Again I'll be juggling multiple apps so the fact that the thing I want 'go back to last thing' is inconsistent always mean the ux is failing me swipe up and pick previous window is my action to get back to the previous thing so when I want to switch back to the previous tab I always without fail by swiping up and then curse that the device didn't do what I want and instead I need to click the 'display tabs icon'. I'm often switching between editor (or 2), terminal, browser, and apps so this idea that I have to always no the exact state I'm and deliberately consciously pick one of 3 different key combos to switch seems crazy to me. Sometimes I press cmd-tab multiple times before my brain realizes I need to click a tab. so it's cmd-tab again and then click the tab. I do the 'one' action (cmd-tab) and get a different app instead of the last tab. it just wants 'back to the last active thing' whatever that thing was.

My brain doesn't want to have to remember that. My mind is stuck on one hotkey that I want to mean 'switch back to the last thing I was looking at' but that doesn't work because if the last thing was another app or another tab or window in the same program then I would need a different key. 25 years of alt+tab/Ctrl+tab/cmd+tab and I still can never switch to the thing I want. I have never enjoyed the distinction between apps, app windows, and in app windows.

Mac command tab to alt tab