The Fastest Way to Switch macOS Apps & Windows

The problem with Cmd-Tab

macOS gives you two built-in ways to move between what's open, and both fall short the moment you have real work spread across your screen.

Cmd-Tab cycles through *apps*, not *windows*. If you have five Chrome windows, three Finder windows, and two terminals, Cmd-Tab treats each app as a single stop. You still have to release, squint, and hunt for the right window once you land on the app. (If it keeps landing on the wrong window, here's why.)

Mission Control shows you every window at once — but it's a mouse-and-trackpad gesture. You lift your hands off the keyboard, scan a grid of shrunken thumbnails, and click. It breaks your flow every single time.

Neither one lets you do the thing you actually want: *type a few letters and jump straight to the exact window you're thinking of.*

What "fastest" really means

The fastest switch isn't the one with the flashiest animation. It's the one that:

• Lets you find a window by typing, not by hunting.
• Searches windows, not just apps.
• Finds windows on every Space and display, not just the one you're looking at.
• Ranks results by what you most likely want (recently used first).

That's the model behind a command palette — the same pattern that made "Go to file" and "Command-K" indispensable in modern editors. Switchi brings it to your whole Mac.

Meet Switchi

Switchi is a command palette for switching, organizing, and acting on running macOS apps and their windows — think *AltTab meets a command palette*. It lives in your menu bar with no Dock icon, and one global hotkey (⌘E by default, fully configurable) toggles it in and out of view.

Press the hotkey and Switchi appears on your current Space with the search box focused. Start typing and it fuzzy-matches across both the app name and the window title at once.

Switch in three keystrokes

Here's the whole loop:

• Press ⌘E to summon Switchi.
• Type a few letters of the app or window title.
• Press Enter — or click the tile — to jump straight to it.

And when you just want to flip back to where you were, you don't even type: Switchi pre-selects the window you were last in, so a single Enter switches straight back — the exact Cmd-Tab reflex you already have, kept intact.

No releasing, no hunting. Under the hood, Switchi raises the exact window (by its stable CGWindowID) and activates its app, honoring an auto-focus policy and a focus guard so nothing steals focus mid-switch.

More than switching

Because every window is already in front of you, acting on it is just one more step — a keystroke or a click on the hover controls:

• Close a window with Cmd+W, or quit the whole app — hold the quit control briefly so a stray click never quits.
• Minimize or restore with Cmd+M.
• Pin the windows you return to constantly into a dedicated column with Cmd+P.
• Filter to a single app with the filter chips, or to one desktop with the Space dropdown; sort by recent, name, or app.
• Hide apps you never want in the palette with per-app exceptions.
• Launch an app that isn't running yet — flip to the built-in Launchpad for a macOS-style grid of every installed app, then type to filter and press Enter to open one. Or skip the toggle and just prefix your search with / (e.g. /teams) to launch it straight from the search box.
• Favorite the apps you reach for constantly — they sit in a quick-launch dock along the footer, visible in every view and one click from launching, with a Dock-style dot when the app is already running.

Optional live thumbnails (via ScreenCaptureKit) let you glance at a window before you jump, and phantom-window filtering quietly drops the hidden ghost windows that other switchers show by mistake.

Why native matters

Switchi reads the real window list straight from macOS — CGWindowList for every window across every Space, the Accessibility API to raise and control them, and NSWorkspace for accurate app icons. That's how it can list windows you can't even see right now, address them by a stable id, and act on them reliably. A browser extension or a web app simply can't reach that layer of the OS.

Try it

If Cmd-Tab has been slowing you down for years, a command palette is the upgrade you didn't know you needed. Switchi is a one-time purchase — a lifetime license, no subscription — for macOS. Try every feature free for 7 days, no card required.

Native, menu-bar only, and built to get out of your way.