Comparison
Witch is the closest thing to this app that already exists, and it got there first by about two decades. It switches apps, windows and tabs, with search. If you're weighing the two, this is the comparison where the gap is narrowest and I have to work hardest to justify myself.
Many Tricks put it plainly on their own site: the built-in switcher is fine if all you use are one-window applications, but you probably have many windows in many apps, possibly with many tabs. That's the same observation this app is built on. Witch has been acting on it since long before I noticed the problem.
Witch treats tabs as a first-class switching target wherever it finds them, not just in Chrome and Safari. This app reads exactly two browsers and nothing else — no Finder tabs, no terminal tabs, no Arc. That's a narrower net than Witch casts.
Sort order, orientation, how tabs are handled, separate switchers on separate shortcuts — you can shape Witch into the switcher you specifically want. This app has opinions and a short settings window, which is a polite way of saying you get my preferences.
$14, including at least a year of updates, and the licence is valid forever. They were shipping Mac utilities when I was still using someone else's. If you want to bet on a developer being around in 2030, bet on them and not on me.
Witch's model is a set of switchers — one for apps, one for windows, one for tabs — each with its own shortcut and its own behaviour. It's flexible and it's coherent. But it asks a question at the moment of switching that I could never answer fast enough: what kind of thing is the thing I want?
I don't know. I want the PR. Whether that's a tab in Chrome or a window in an editor is an implementation detail of where I last left it, and having to pick the right shortcut first means deciding before I've remembered.
Witch matches targets by name — the tab's title, the window's title. That's the obvious thing to match on and it's what nearly everyone does. It just isn't how I remember things.
I want to go back to GitHub. I never knew that GitHub titled the page "Fix ranking on cold start by ron · Pull Request #42 · questionarc/switcher", and I never will. Gmail's is "Inbox (47)". The one string I reliably have in my head is the domain, so that's what a tab is matched on here — hostname and path alongside the title. github, localhost, github/pull. When three tabs are all titled "App Store Connect", only the path tells them apart.
Witch's search field thins the list of matching targets in real time, and it works well. But what sits behind the query is a recency ordering, and that's the thing I couldn't get past. With six editor windows called Code, "most recent" is close to no information at all.
Every switch cost me four or five characters of disambiguation. Not much. Several hundred times a day, it added up to the reason this app exists.
Witch will get you to the right target. It won't bring the target to the display you're facing, and it doesn't advertise multi-display behaviour at all. On one screen that's a non-issue. On two it was half my frustration.
One keystroke, one list. Tabs and windows ranked together, so you type the name of the thing without first deciding what kind of thing it is.
Ordering comes from where you switched from. In the web project ⌥ Space offers that repo's PR and its localhost; from the iOS project the same keys offer different ones. Nothing to configure.
← or → mid-switch opens the target on the display in that direction. Already there? Nothing moves.
This is the flip side of Witch's flexibility and I won't pretend it's purely an advantage. You get one switcher, tuned my way, and if my way isn't your way there's no preference pane to rescue it.
| Context Switcher | Witch | |
|---|---|---|
| Individual windows | Yes | Yes |
| Tabs | Chrome and Safari only | Yes, more broadly |
| Search by name | Yes | Yes |
| Find a tab by hostname or URL | Host, path and title | By title |
| Tabs and windows in one ranked list | Yes | Separate switchers |
| Ranks by where you switched from | Yes | Recency, configurable |
| Send it to a display while switching | Yes — ← → | No |
| Configurability | Deliberately little | Extensive |
| Track record | Version 0.2.0 | Twenty years |
| Price | $10 once, 14-day trial | $14, upgrades $8 |
Use Witch if you want tabs in more places than two browsers, if you enjoy shaping a tool to fit exactly, or if buying from a developer with two decades behind them matters to you. All three are good reasons and I don't have a rebuttal to any of them.
Use this if you want one keystroke instead of three, ordering that works out the project you're in on its own, and the ability to pull a window onto the screen you're facing without leaving the switch.
Honestly: this is the closest call on the site. If you already own Witch and it's working, I'd think twice before spending another ten dollars. Fourteen days will tell you whether the ranking makes a difference in your day — if it doesn't, it doesn't, and Witch is a fine place to stay.
No account, no sign-in. macOS 14+, Apple Silicon & Intel. 2.2 MB.
Witch's features and pricing checked August 2026 against manytricks.com/witch. Witch is highly configurable, so some behaviour described here as a default can be changed in its preferences. No affiliation, no referral links. Corrections to support@questionarc.com.