Recently my alt-tab functionality in Windows 8 reverted to a much more boring version. Instead of displaying super hand pictures of the target windows it showed just their icons. This makes it very tough to identify which explorer window I’m headed towards.

I discovered that the setting to change between the 2 modes is located deep in the registry. For those of you that know what I’m talking about the key is

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
setAltTabSettings = 0 for pretty preview mode
setAltTabSettings = 1 for old school XP display

Even if you like editing the registry, I recommend this awesome free tool. It’s called Alt+Tab Tuner by winaero.com. You can download it here. It gives you the power to change settings you didn’t even know you were missing. Increase the size of the previews, decide how many previews show up on each column or row, change transparency values. This is functionality that should have been included with Windows. It’s super tiny and doesn’t require an install. Just download and run.

One point of clarity, 0 means default so if you want minimum spacing set it to 1 like in the picture above.