TS-Tobias / launch-focus-or-hide

This Hammerspoon script allows users to switch between applications by launching the application if it's not already running, bringing it to the front if it's in the background or hidden, and hiding the application when it is in the foreground.

Launch, Focus or Hide Application Switcher

This is a very simple script that I wrote to achieve the following behaviour when switching applications:

When you press a user-defined application hotkey, one of three things happen:

1. If the application is not running, launch the app and bring it to the front
2. If the application is already running, but in the background or hidden, bring it to the front
3. If the application is already in the front, hide it

Once setup for your most used applications, it is super quick to switch between apps. For apps that I use only occasionally, I still use the well established CMD + TAB and ALT + TAB using AltTab. I personally prefer CMD + TAB for switching between applications and ALT/OPTION + TAB for switching between an application's open windows.

Installation

Prerequisites

You have to have Hammerspoon installed on your machine.

Automatic Setup Script

If your Hammerspoon configuration is located at ~/.hammerspoon/ (default location), you can run the script setup.sh to automatically copy the files to the config directory and add the required imports to the init.lua file. Once executed, you simply have to tell Hammerspoon to reload the config using the menu bar application.

Manual Setup

1. Copy launch-focus-or-hide.lua and auto-reload.lua (optional) to your Hammerspoon config directory.
2. Add the contents of this repository's init.lua to the init.lua file inside your Hammerspoon config directory. If you don't want to use the auto-reload feature, simply don't copy its import statement.
3. Tell Hammerspoon to reload it's config using its menu bar application.

Configuration

You can set up a hotkey for every application you want quick access to.

First, specify the modifier keys that you want to use to switch applications.

local modifiers = {"alt", "ctrl", "shift"}

Below, add any application of your liking with a corresponding trigger key. Make sure, that you don't define the same key twice since it will override the first hotkey.

keys["V"] = "com.microsoft.VSCode"

If you have imported the "auto-reload" script inside init.lua (automatically included if you used setup.sh), Hammerspoon will automatically reload the config once you save the file (as long as you don't cause any errors).

Roadmap

• Allow users to use different modifier keys for each application
• Make unassigned alphabetic keys rotate between all applications whose name start with that key
• Make further improvements to the setup script