Weird Alt Tab Behavior Is Normal In Windows 11?

I just got a new computer and it came with Windows 11.

I'm noticing 2 weird things in relation to windower:

First, I had to disable snap windows and fiddle with the alt tab settings to make it work more like my previous version of windows which I want to say was 8 or possibly 10. Normal programs, folders, and web browsers understand that if i alt + tab that it will bring me back to the previous item i was using. I could normally switch back and forth between two things quickly, like 2 characters or a character and a lua/chrome to do gear on my previous computer.

The current functionality it seems to have is that it gets stuck when using windower so that it won't tab back and forth between it and another item. I usually have to minimize other windows if i want to use the calculator or lua file overlayed over windower. I can alt tab multiple time to see other things but I can't use the normal functionality between windower and anything else to tab back and forth between them.

It gets a little weirder when I have two characters going then i have to alt tab 3 times to go back and forth between them. The first one bring up whatever the last non-windower program/folder/app i used last, the next one tabs me back to the windower window I was just on, the third one bring me to the 2nd character I was attempting to get to. Before this would just be 1 alt + tab.

I'm usually only playing 1 character these days, but I sometimes take my wife's character out to do stuff like einherjar when either of us is working on a mythic because 2 for 1 is much better than doing it again. Very annoying in general but I can live with it if there is nothing to be done. If anyone has any tips of fixes I would love to hear it.


The second thing that is just weird is that if I have my wife's character on at the same time it and i'm in the equipment menu it will display my current gear but it won't show me any other gear for the slot i've selected. She has 8 full wardrobes and you can go from the 1st to the 8th and it will show no items in any of them. They still exist in the actual wardrobes and i can equip gear with lua or equip commands so i can do things like equip ring1 "warp ring". But I can't actually select anything in the equipment menu and I can't put things in equipsets from her wardrobes but things from inventory and storages are selectable. It works just fine on her own computer.

Again weird, I already have the obvious work around which is to do all her equipment on her own computer and send myself the file. Clunky, too many steps, but most of her jobs are completed and luas are written so I don't think this is a dire emergency.

Any help would be appreciated.

For the second, I can't help you, but if you come to windower discord to have a chat it's possible there's a solution.

For the first, it's a really shitty new functionality by Windows 11, where it "knows" that all your instances of FFXI are the same software, so it tabs you "out" of it with the first other different software you have been using. I do not know if there's a solution, but I do know it's a win11 thing.

This fixes the behavior mentioned:

I did do that but I turned snap windows off. Maybe another restart will get it

I have the same problem, it seems to have arisen following the latest Windows update.
Following various tips and videos I tried everything, every single Windows setting related to multitasking/Alt-Tab and some changes to the registry but nothing seems to work.

I still have nothing for the 1st one, but for the 2nd one I found a post on the official forums that said to take a piece of gear out of each and then put it back in. My wife took a piece of gear out of all of her wardrobes. Shutdown. I logged her character in. Put the gear back in the wardrobes. Magically fixed itself.

I'll drop by the windower discord later today and see if I can give you more info.

The game keeps a copy of your inventory cached on disk, so it makes a lot of sense that this would work - it's forcing the cache to update. Good tip, thanks.

Yeah no problem. Hopefully this isn't a common problem but if it is, it's nice there is a solution.

I don't think there is anything to be done about the alt tab situation when you have multiple clients open. Is there anything useful I can share to help?

You can check out the switch_focus addon recently added to the launcher, it lets you switch between windower instances, you can //switch next to cycle through you boxes, I made it kinda for this purpose. That said I believe people have gotten old alt tab behavior back idk the specifics though or if the were only single boxing.

That is really cool. After you use switch n, function is actually restored to alt + tab for an additional occurrence before going back to the default behavior. I might make this a dedicated controller button. Thank you very much.

Idk if you want to add a description in the addons tab for windower just simply saying it addresses alt + tab function on windows 11. The /help menu is more than sufficient in game.

I ran into this too with a new computer on 24H2. It's driving me nuts. From what I can gather this is an intended change in behavior in windows and unlike previous behavior changes, windows deleted the old functionally fully. So no way to re-enable the setting via registry or anything.

You know random thought but have you tried control tab? idk maybe they changed the behavior of control tab to cycle the processes in the same group? (though idk how they would handle that for windows with tabs)

control tab doesn't do anything in or out of windower though that would have been a really nice thought.

So just as an extra piece of info for you. I've tried using keybinds on the mapping software that I use for my controller binds to set an alt + tab key in the past. It failed spectacularly and would rarely do what I was asking it to do. I just mapped //switch n to something I bound and it works great. You have actually increased my QoL by having to overcome weird windows 11 functions.

So thank you again.