I wrote a post last year about replacing Command+Tab with Witch, an application switcher replacement for Mac OS X. When I moved to my new apartment early in January, my Linux server was without Internet access for a few weeks so I was forced to use a graphical IM client (as opposed to a console-based client).
David was using Adium at the time, so I decided to give it a try. It's definitely a nice messaging application -- nice enough that I haven't felt compelled to get my console client setup again (but I'm sure I will at some point; the command line rules!). Now, on to the point of this post.
After pressing Command+Tab to switch from an IM conversation to another application, here is what I saw when I pressed Command+Tab to return to the IM window:
As you can see, Witch doesn't select my Adium IM conversation window ("Raam Dev" in this example) but oddly selects the Adium Contacts window, even though I was never looking at that window. This meant every time I switched from a conversation window to an application, I had to press Command+Tab+Tab+Tab just to get back to the previous window! Not only that, but normally I was trying to switch back to the IM window just to get rid of the distracting "new message notification" in the dock and being unable to do this quickly was really frustrating.
As extremely annoying as it was, it always bugged me at a time when I was too busy to figure out how to fix it. And by the time I was not busy I had forgotten about it. This pattern continued for THREE MONTHS (yes, I'm a very patient person)!
Today I decided I'd had enough. I took a peek at the Witch preferences (System Preferences -> Witch) and discovered that I could simply tell Witch to ignore the Contacts window! Doh!
Now when I press Command+Tab after switching to another application, the IM conversation window is the first item selected.
Woohoo! Sanity!