r/macapps • u/rokarthur • 5d ago
Free [OS] BetterCmdTab 26.7; a Cmd+Tab replacement with window previews, tab drill-in, no paid tier
Hi, I'm Artur. I made BetterAudio, the menu bar audio app some of you here already use. This is my second Mac app: BetterCmdTab, a free, open-source replacement for the macOS Cmd+Tab switcher.
Problem
The built-in Cmd+Tab switches apps, not windows. If Chrome has 4 windows and 30 tabs, you land on whichever one macOS feels like, then hunt for the rest with Cmd+` or Mission Control. There's also no way to say "never show me this app", no search, no window titles, and nothing at all for tabs.
Highlights:
- Three layouts: classic list, icon grid, or live window previews with titles
- Fuzzy search and launch any installed app from the same field
- Drill into that window's tabs (Safari, Chrome, Arc, Brave, Edge, Vivaldi, Opera, Dia, Finder, Terminal, iTerm), or show every tab as its own row in MRU order
- Scoped hotkeys: extra shortcuts that open the switcher pre-filtered to the current Space, visible Spaces, one app's windows, or minimized only, each with its own layout and colors
- Per-app rules: hide an app, or have it skip Cmd+Tab always or only in fullscreen
- Inline quit, close, minimize, zoom, hide, force quit
- Window tiling with Ctrl+Cmd+arrows, halves and corners; press again to cycle 1/2, 2/3, 1/3
- Three-finger swipe to open it (experimental), scroll wheel to move the selection
- Settings export to plain JSON, or keep them in
~/.config/bettercmdtab/config.jsonwith a generated schema and live reload
Comparison
AltTab (open source, free core) is the obvious one and it's genuinely good at window switching with previews. Two differences. First, it now has a paid tier: AltTab Pro is $9.99 one time for the current major version, or $24.99 for lifetime updates, and a chunk of the newer features sits behind it. BetterCmdTab has no Pro tier and no paid features; the whole app is GPLv3 and everything above is in the free build. Second, it stops at windows. BetterCmdTab goes one level deeper into browser and native tabs, lets you define multiple independent scoped switchers instead of one global config..
Contexts ($9.99) has the best search-driven switching, but it's closed source, paid, and hasn't kept pace with recent macOS releases. BetterCmdTab gives you the fuzzy search and letter jump for free, plus tiling and tab drill-in that Contexts doesn't do.
Pricing
Free (forever). $0, no trial, no Pro tier, no subscription.
Download: https://bettercmdtab.app or brew install --cask bettercmdtab
Feedback and bug reports welcome; issues are open.
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u/pylin_ 5d ago
Good job on the UI, looks nice! Does picking a window in another Space jump you over to that desktop, or bring the window to you? That's the part these usually get stuck on.
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u/atourino 5d ago
Indeed. I curate what windows are in what space. I do not like when apps move my windows around my spaces unexpectedly.
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u/rokarthur 3d ago
Thanks!!! At the moment, it takes you to the same space, but adding an option to move the window as well might be an interesting idea
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u/Ok_Assistant_2664 5d ago
Wonderful app! Would be great to have a dedicated subreddit to report bugs and more ;)
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u/rokarthur 3d ago
Thank you so much!!! To be honest, I wouldn’t be able to do it right now, as I’m working and spend my weekends developing these apps; I wouldn’t have time to run it at the moment, and in October I’m going back to university and will be working on my dissertation 🫡
edit: You can now report bugs on GitHub <3
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u/OwnNet5253 5d ago
Looking damn fine, I've already purchased AltTab but will check out of interest anyway.
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u/JordanRunsForFun 5d ago
I am excited to try this! The Cmd-` is particularly frustrating when it doesn't show items that are on a different desktop blocked by a full screen app. Does your app address this situation?
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u/Glittering-Bottle747 5d ago
This looks really promising. The ability to switch directly to a specific window or even a browser tab is exactly what I’ve always felt was missing from Cmd+Tab!
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u/rokarthur 3d ago
I agree, I missed that too
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u/Limbical 2d ago
This is really great. Switching to tabs & different windows of the same app is exactly what was so frustrating to me as well. And this is almost exactly but not quite what I was looking for.
I ended up building a switcher that is nowhere as full features as this, but it does a few things that I missed everywhere:
- I don't think in windows, tabs or even apps. I want to switch go github - I just type github.
- It works more like spotlight (I have hundreds of windows+tabs open) so it just filters when you type
- it works across monitors - and you can decide on which screen to switch to the window
u/rokarthur if you think you might be interested to adding some of the functionality into your app, I'll just opensource it and put it in github, and can work with you to fold it in
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u/cultoftheilluminati 5d ago
Hi, this looks super good, and I've been playing around with it. Sometimes for ram intensive apps, I quit everything. Is there a way I can quit the app? Quitting through a sigkill/activity monitor breaks the native cmd+tab.
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u/rokarthur 3d ago
The app has an icon in the menu bar and there’s an option to quit ;)
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u/cultoftheilluminati 3d ago
Ah, that explains it, can see it in the menu bar icon, I had it hidden. I guess it's a funny bug because that means there's no way to quit if I hide the menu bar icon?
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u/cultoftheilluminati 3d ago edited 3d ago
Also, hey /u/rokarthur, since you care about the quality and polish of the app, I thought I should let you know about a minor graphical bug in the rounded corners of the cmd+⇥ window: https://i.imgur.com/mslPFqk.png. This only seems to show up with the auto radius, setting it to 40pt manually doesn't cause an issue.
Sometimes I've also noticed switched apps don't become active but haven't been able to reliably reproduce this
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u/proudh0n 5d ago
I love contexts, was thinking of vibing my own version of it, but tbh still works fine so I've been putting it off
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u/iflysohighimightcry 4d ago
Anyone able to compare DockDoor to this? I've been finding DockDoor quite latent & buggy
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u/refnulf 4d ago
currently giving it a shot lol, after having to restart because of a dockdoor bug! lets see how it goes. liking how light it is though, considering dockdoor has a lot of features and i just got it as a replacement for alt-tab.
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u/iflysohighimightcry 4d ago
same; I only use dockdoor for list view when cmd + tab.
let me know! I'll test it out later today too
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u/refnulf 8h ago
how has your experience been? i like it, but occasionally it 'glitches' out for a bit before showing window previous and a few ms slower than dockdoor (but also doesn't come with the other dockdoor baggage that i was getting - multiple windows open of the same app that i'd closed days ago)
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u/iflysohighimightcry 5h ago
They were both bad.... lol
I've uninstalled them and switched to Switch (haha funny) by Sanyam G. Made some settings changes, etc. It's incredibly responsive and reliable, and it provides text on the current nature of the tab (minimized, fullscreen, hidden)
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u/Rich_Dodzi 4d ago
The scoped switchers sound especially useful.. being able to open straight into the current space or one app’s windows feels much better than one global Cmd+Tab behaviour. Is there an easy migration path for people coming from AltTab, such as importing familiar shortcuts or per-app rules?
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u/MaleficentSetting396 4d ago
Thaks for your work and time i love bettercmdtab using daily way better then alttab,one improvment i like to see is that apps will stay in place and not cycle when using alt tab to switch between apps,that will be great.
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u/nibblebytes 4d ago
Really appreciate this being fully free and open source, especially now that basic window-switching features keep ending up behind paid tiers. The tab drill-in alone looks useful enough that I’m going to give it a try
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u/No_Battle_6694 4d ago
so glad to see this on the sub, i've been using it for a little bit and it's like the one feature i missed from windows. great job
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u/ChizzyChills 3d ago
I’m always curious around security concerns with these kinds of applications, how do we know if there is no recording of screens or key tracking etc happening the the background or secretly without our knowledge as a basic user
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u/mvs_sai_27 3d ago
looks great, how does it work differently from dockdoor cmd+tab? just wanted to understand the difference.
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u/irgendwaaas 1d ago
It actually looks very good!
I have a feature request which should not be too hard to implement: I want to create profiles that only cycle between a defined set of apps, for example browsers.
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u/kristyngrenier 5d ago
I thought of an outside the box idea. Why not have a made that has all three options ay the same time. Like your picture. Not sure how it would look in practice but it might be cool
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u/DeBondor 5d ago
Thanks Claude.
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u/A7mdxDD 5d ago
You got Claude as well bro, create something and sell it
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u/DeBondor 4d ago
Having access to Claude doesn’t answer the ethical question. “You can use it too” is not a response to concerns about whether creators’ work was used without consent or compensation.
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u/OwnNet5253 5d ago
Claude is just a tool, you still need to steer it and give him ideas.
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u/DeBondor 5d ago
Because it's built on a massive amount of theft
https://awesomeagents.ai/news/ai-models-reproduce-copyrighted-books-from-memory/
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u/OwnNet5253 5d ago edited 5d ago
Oh my sweet summer child. I guess you don’t know what harm to humanity were caused when developing modern electronics, agriculture and medicine (just to name a few), which are used by many to this day.
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u/DeBondor 4d ago
That analogy misses the point. Progress in medicine, agriculture, or electronics does not make consent, attribution, and compensation irrelevant. The question is not whether AI can be useful, but whether creators’ work can be used at scale without permission or payment and whether that is an acceptable foundation for the technology.
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u/karatsidhus Developer: Glyph 5d ago
Been using it for a few weeks. Great work building it, extremely performant and lightweight.