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