Show HN: Macscope – I decide to built a better Cmd-Tab replacement for macOS (macscope.app)
Macscope is a new window manager and and app switcher for macOS built on the philosophy of enhancing, not replacing, your existing muscle memory.
It works by augmenting the familiar Cmd+Tab workflow. A quick tap of your shortcut instantly switches between recent apps, just like you're used to. A slightly longer hold, however, opens the full Macscope interface where you can manage all your open windows and tabs.
You can also use modifier shortcuts to enter Placement Modes, which let you instantly snap a selected window to the left/right/top/bottom/ half of your screen.
Here are some of the key features:
- Unified Search & Switch: A single interface to instantly find and switch to any window, browser tab (Safari, Chrome, Arc, etc.), or application just by typing.
- Live Previews: See a real-time preview of what's inside each window so you know exactly where you're going. You can also disable previews for a more minimal experience.
- Advanced Window Management: Go beyond just switching. Select multiple windows and arrange them into layouts like vertical/horizontal splits or grids.
- Scopes: Save collections of app windows as a "Scope" and instantly restore that entire workspace later. It's ideal for quickly switching between different projects or tasks.
It’s a native macOS app built with Swift and supports both Apple Silicon and Intel machines.
Launch Offer for HN:
There's a free trial with 250 actions. For the Hacker News community, I'm offering a 50% discount on the lifetime license.
Website: https://macscope.app
Discord Community: https://discord.gg/ehktEWr97K
I'll be here all day to answer questions and would be grateful for any feedback. Thanks for checking it out!
13 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 31.2 ms ] threadFor years, I've felt this low-grade friction using macOS. I live on the keyboard, but managing windows always felt like a mouse-first task. Cmd+Tab is great until you have more than couple of apps open, and then it's just this endless, frustrating cycle. Mission Control is a visual puzzle that offers no keyboard-driven way to filter the chaos, forcing you back to the trackpad every time.
Coming from tools like the terminal and code editors where you can jump between anything instantly with a few keystrokes, the OS layer felt slow and inefficient by comparison.
That's really where the ideas for Macscope came from. The "tap vs. hold" mechanic was born from wanting to keep my Cmd+Tab muscle memory but add more power on top. The "Scopes" feature came directly from my frustration of manually rearranging the same 5-6 windows every single time I started working on a specific project.
It started as a tool just for me, but I'm hoping it resonates with others who feel the same way about their workflow. I'm really curious to hear if others share these frustrations and what your own workarounds have been.
Thanks again for all the feedback so far!
I use the free Alt-Tab app to hide most apps, works well.
It has screen recording though, bc it creates previews. So best to block it from accessing the network with LuLu, just in case.
It's also not showing apps in other spaces, which I would like to be shown. Mac's default Cmd+Tab does that.
It doesn't work great for me, personally. Takes 5-10 seconds to respond to CMD+Tab, and shows hundreds of browser tabs instead of just the five I have open (I think it's seeing pinned tabs, which are actually bookmarks).
Still, I applaud you for this! It's refreshing to see this type of innovation.
Looks pretty clean. Nice job with that aspect.
Following up on our conversation from a few days ago. You asked about resizing the grid to show more or fewer items, and I'm happy to announce that this feature is now live in the latest version (v1.35)!
While Macscope is open, you can now use
Command + Plus (⌘+) and Command + Minus (⌘-) to dynamically increase or decrease the size of the previews. This allows you to shrink them down to see many more windows at once—which should be a big help for managing the large number of apps you mentioned—or make them larger for a more detailed view.
Thanks again for the excellent feedback; it directly helped shape this update.
Hope you get a chance to try it out!
It's not perfect, but it's off to a great start. I can't really provide useful feedback until I've spent more time integrating it into my workflow. But I can tell you that I test-drive a lot of apps that look interesting and this is one of the rare gems that I knew right away is a good fit for me.
But the best part: Apple broke the workflow for cycling open windows via hotkey more than a decade ago and they haven't fixed it. Closing or interacting with a window in the middle of cycling through them causes the order to reverse. Interacting with another window causes it to reverse again. It's madness. I used to hope to see it fixed with each major releases. I've long since given up on that. Apparently, no one in the c-suite at Apple manages dozens of open windows on a daily basis.
Your app solves this problem, one that has been tripping me up for sixteen years. Thank you. For that alone, I'd have kept it installed. The rest is just gravy on top.