Layers

Think Spaces but without the isolation. Layer apps on top of each other and reliably swap to them with keyboard shortcuts.

OSX only. Depends on ruby, xargs, and osascript which should all be installed by default.

Usage

• Clone this repo and cd into it
• Create ~/.layers with a line for each layer of apps. Separate the apps by commas. Example below.
• chmod +x layers
• run ./layers
• add keyboard shortcuts based on the output
  • I'm using Alfred Workflows for this, but any app that lets you run shell commands via keyboard shortcuts will work.

Example ~/.layers file

Here's the ~/.layers file I'm using at time of writing.

Alacritty
Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome
Slack
Messages, Music, Stream Deck
zoom.us

How does it work?

Read the source and maybe check out this blog post for more context.

How can I preserve app focus order in a layer?

By default, we use -P 8 in the xargs keybinding to parallelize focussing apps. For layers where a deterministic app order is preferred, swap the 8 to a 1.