window's title shows by process (.exe) name, not by own caption

[kopbuh91]

window's title shows by process (.exe) properties, not by own caption - its wrong
for example: Steam window in CmdTab shows as "Steam Web Helper", but his caption is "Sign in Steam"

[stianhoiland]

Hey, thanks for reporting.

This is intended behavior. cmdtab doesn't use window titles; instead it uses application names. This is because the cmdtab switcher shows applications, not windows[^1]. You might not even believe me but unfortunately Windows programs don't actually have a definitive "application name" field that I can pull from and show in the switcher, so I have to fallback to some conventions (technically called version info) for getting a semblance of an application name to show in cmdtab. There are no particular constraints on what an application developer puts in these version info fields that I'm pulling from—it's just a convention to put the application name there.

There are similar issues for window titles. Window titles may or may not contain the developer's idea of the application name, and may or may not contain additional text disambiguating the window from other windows of the same application—or anything else for any other reason. The application developer can do whatever they want with the window title and there is no way for me to unambiguously parse it for an application name vs. text of any other meaning the developer put there. In fact, it's not even technically called "the window title" but "the window text"; even more generic!

These—and many other things—were quite surprising and unexpected for me when I set out to make cmdtab. There's quite a bit of unsightly sausage making when it comes to window management on Windows; and that's maybe not so strange—and rather impressive actually—considering that even today it's all running on the same basic concepts as invented more than 26 years ago in Windows 2000.

[^1] This will change with next release, which supports showing individual application windows in the switcher not grouped by application. Under this configuration cmdtab does use straight window titles.

EDIT v1.6.3 is out.