A CLI MacOS utility that provides global hotkeys to activate apps in the Dock by their ordinal positions.
The code was mostly written via Anthropic's Claude Code. Many key suggestions came from other bots.
- Press Control+Command+backtick to activate app 0 in your Dock (Finder).
- Press Control+1-0 to activate the other apps in your Dock (from 1 to 10).
- Minimal and lightweight.
- No external dependencies.
- No AppleScript.
- CLI only.
- MacOS 12.0 or later.
- Swift. May require
xcode-select --install.
First, clone this repository via git, or download the zip. Navigate to its directory in a terminal.
You can try out the app without any installation. The OS will prompt you about #permissions, see instructions below.
make runIf you intend to run it manually as a dock_hotkeys command (from any directory), this command copies the executable to ~/.local/bin, making it globally available:
make installIf you prefer it to auto-start and run in the background, this command adds the plist to ~/Library/LaunchAgents and starts the agent:
make agentOptionally run make clean to remove build cache (150 MB or so), which is unused after installation.
To remove both the executable and the agent plist, run make uninstall.
Then go to System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility, and remove dock_hotkeys if it's present.
dock_hotkeys requires Accessibility permissions to function properly. When you first launch the app, you'll be prompted to grant these permissions.
If you're running the app from a terminal in the foreground, the OS may ask you to allow Terminal to control this computer. If you're running the app in the background via a launch agent, you'll need to grant permissions specifically to the app:
- Go to System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility.
- Click the lock icon to make changes.
- Add
dock_hotkeysto the list of apps (if missing), and turn the switch on.
The OS may also open a dialog with something like:
"dock_hotkeys" wants access to control "System Events.app"
If it does, click "Allow" or similar.
The new permissions should be detected within a few seconds.
If the app is running but does not appear to work after granting all permissions, restart it via make agent.restart.
Once dock_hotkeys is running and you've granted it accessibility permissions (and waited a few seconds for the change to be detected):
- Press Control+Command+backtick to activate the first app in your Dock (Finder).
- Press Control+1, Control+2 and so on until 0, to activate the other apps in your Dock.
If launched in the foreground from a terminal, the app will keep running until you quit it with Control+C.
- Uses the
CGEventTapAPI to monitor keyboard events and detect matching key combinations. - When a match is detected, uses
NSWorkspace.shared.openApplicationto idempotently open/focus an app. - Gets Dock app positions from Dock preferences accessed via
CFPreferencesCopyMultiple. - Detects changes by watching
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist.- It would be ideal to use an in-memory notification API without having to watch files, but was unable to find a working API that would actually notify us about changes in app positions.
Consider using the RegisterEventHotKey API to register specific hotkeys. In the CGEventTap API, the OS calls our callback for every keystroke. In RegisterEventHotKey, it might not.
Consider another set of ordinal hotkeys (for example Command+Control+N) for switching between windows/instances of the current app. For example, if you have 3 browser windows open, Command+Control+1 for the first, 2 for the second, and so on.
When an app was launched (by the user) by invoking "/Applications/<name>/Contents/MacOS/<name>", dock_hotkeys seems to create a redundant instance of it upon key press, as if it has a different app URL.