Warning

Development of GroupCtrl has been discontinued. No further updates or bug fixes are planned.
I've moved to Hammerspoon for app switching, you can check out my config here. See below for other alternatives.

GroupCtrl

Gain control over your apps with hotkeys for app groups

brew install brodmo/tap/groupctrl or download from Releases

Features

• Instant app switching – Reliable & predictable behavior
• Shared hotkeys – Group related apps and assign a single hotkey to them
• App launcher – Hold a group hotkey to launch apps that aren't running
• Text config – Easy to manually edit and version-control, if you're so inclined

Tips

• Add GroupCtrl to Open at Login in System Settings
• Use Hyperkey or Karabiner to map Caps Lock to Cmd+Opt+Control
• Config path is ~/.config/groupctrl/config.yaml. It looks like this:

  groups:
  - name: Files
    hotkey: Cmd+Opt+Ctrl+F
    apps:
    - com.apple.finder
    - com.apple.Preview
    - com.sublimetext.4
  - name: Terminal
    hotkey: Cmd+Opt+Ctrl+T
    apps:
    - com.apple.Terminal

Useful macOS shortcuts

• Cmd+Opt+D to hide Dock
• Cmd+Backtick to switch between windows of an app
• F11 to show desktop

Privacy

GroupCtrl is 100% offline and does not gather any user data.

Alternatives

• rcmd – Similar functionality, but shared hotkeys aren't practical
• FlashSpace – Workspace manager with app hiding
• AeroSpace – Tiling window manager

I've used all three extensively but was never quite satisfied. I wanted to build something that combines the simplicity of rcmd with the flexibility of FlashSpace and the consistency of AeroSpace.

Roadmap

• Add launcher pop-up
• Complete Windows port
  • Custom app picker
  • Windows app enumeration for picker
  • Windows app metadata extraction
  • Windows app launching
  • Windows window tracking
  • UWP app support

Development

• Requires npm
• Run with cargo run

Hot reload (macOS only)

• One-time: cargo install dioxus-cli
• dx serve & npm run watch