Useful tools for editors: Witch

Often a useful editing tools is not something that directly interfaces with your editing application of choice or your media or your render files or anything directly related to editing itself. It is often a useful system tool that while making life easier in the edit can also improve your efficiency in and around the Mac OS system as well. One such utility was pointed out by Steve over at the Splice Here blog. It would be a little piece of donationware called Witch. Witch lets you switch between open windows (in the Mac OS) via the keyboard, not unlike the built in application switching short cut of Command+tab. Witch takes it one step further with a user assignable keystroke that can switch between all open apps and their active windows. It is highly customizable as you can see from the set-up window below:

One thing I don’t understand is why is seems to show unaccessible windows in Final Cut Pro as you can see in the image at the top of the page; it’s showing a window for RT Overlays. A small glitch to overlook with the great functionality it gives. Why not just use the mouse to click the window you want? Most efficient editors will tell you that the less you touch the keyboard the faster you can work and Witch will help you touch the mouse less … so it is indeed a useful tool for an editor.