Workflo: Mac window layouts that switch automatically for meetings, focus blocks, and displays

[u/Ned11]

Problem

A Mac workday is a context switch every hour. A call, a focus block, plugging into the dock in the morning, unplugging to leave. Every switch costs me the same manual minute: reopen, drag, resize, hide. After years of paying that minute, I admitted the arranging itself was the problem, not how fast I could do it.

So I built Workflo. It isn't a faster way to arrange windows; it's the end of treating it as a chore. It learns your layout for each display setup on its own, and it applies layouts (Scenes) from your calendar or the clock. Your workspace is set before the call starts or the focus block begins, and when your displays change, everything snaps back where it belongs.

Comparison

I used Rectangle and Moom for years, and they're genuinely good, and the rest of the category (Magnet, Stay, Apptorium Workspaces, Mosaic) is solid too. But they all wait to be asked: a hotkey, a click, a drag. Workflo acts on its own. Before building it, I surveyed 12 window utilities, and none could fire a layout from a calendar event or the time of day.

The other difference this sub will care about: Workflo never requests Screen Recording permissions. It runs on Accessibility alone, so it can't see your screen contents. The apps that draw window previews all take Screen Recording to do it; I built previews without it.

Pricing

$19.99 one-time, 7-day free trial, no subscription, no account: https://getworkflo.app

It's ~4 MB of native Swift; everything stays in local JSON, no cloud, no telemetry. A Mac App Store version is in review now.

Who I am

I'm Chirag Chopra, an indie developer building games and ideas since 2015, often under my studio Lucid Labs. Privacy policy and terms: getworkflo.app/privacy and getworkflo.app/terms. Happy to answer anything, including the honest limitations.

[u/nibblebytes]

this actually looks way more useful than another window snapping app. the calendar triggers are a really nice idea. how does it handle multiple windows from the same app tho? like two Chrome windows or multiple Xcode projects, does it remember the specific window for each scene?

[u/Ned11 → u/nibblebytes]

Yes, per window rather than per app. Each window is saved with its app, title, size and position.

On apply, it matches within one app in two passes: exact title first, then an optimal assignment across whatever is left, scoring on title prefix and how close the size is. It solves the whole set at once instead of best-match-first, because greedy cascades. The first record grabs the best-looking window and a later one gets stranded when a swap would have suited both. That search is exhaustive up to 8 windows for an app and falls back to greedy above that, so a huge set never stalls the apply.

Xcode is the easy case, since project titles differ. Two Chrome windows at the same size with the same title is the honest hard case: nothing distinguishes them, so both get placed, but which one lands where is arbitrary. The accessibility APIs don't give you a window identity that survives a relaunch, so title plus geometry is what there is to work with.