A fast, keyboard-driven window switcher for macOS. Press a hotkey, fuzzy-search across every open window and browser tab, hit Enter to jump straight to it
- Universal search — fuzzy-matches by app name and window title across all your open windows
- Browser tab search — searches Chrome and Safari tabs alongside windows, and jumps straight to the matching tab
- Terminal tab search — same for Terminal.app tabs
- Live window previews — see a thumbnail of each window before you switch
- Recency-aware ranking — windows and tabs you actually use rise to the top over time
- Global hotkey —
Option + Spaceby default, rebindable in Settings
Switchboard makes no network calls. There is no telemetry, no analytics, no update-checker phoning home — the binary is entirely local-only. Everything it reads (window titles, tab titles, tab URLs) stays on your machine and is used only to build the search index in memory.
Switchboard asks for a few macOS permissions on first launch. Each one maps to a specific feature — you can decline any of them and the rest of the app still works:
| Permission | Why |
|---|---|
| Accessibility | Lists your open windows and focuses the one you pick |
| Automation (Apple Events) | Reads and switches tabs in Chrome, Safari, and Terminal |
| Screen Recording | Generates the live window preview thumbnails |
- Download the latest
Switchboard.dmgfrom Releases - Open the DMG and drag Switchboard into
/Applications - Launch it — since it's a menu-bar-less background app (
LSUIElement), it won't show a Dock icon or window on its own - Grant permissions when prompted
- Press
Option + Spaceto open the palette
Switchboard is signed with a Developer ID certificate and notarized by Apple, so Gatekeeper should let it run without extra steps.
Requires Xcode and XcodeGen.
make run # generates the Xcode project, builds Debug, launches it
make build # build only
make logs # stream the app's unified-logging outputRelease builds (Developer ID signing, notarization, DMG packaging) are also driven by the Makefile, but require your own Developer ID certificate and notarization credentials — see the comments in Makefile.
Swift + SwiftUI + AppKit, targeting macOS 14+. The only external dependency is KeyboardShortcuts by Sindre Sorhus (MIT licensed) for global hotkey registration.
MIT — see LICENSE.