In a previous Sunday Serial, I wrote about Keyboard Maestro’s Application Switcher, and its affinity, in my mind, with the Classic Mac OS’s tear off application switcher. Another utility emblematic of restoring classic functionality to macOS is SwitchGlass from John Siracusa.

SwitchGlass looks like the Dock, but unlike the Dock, only shows you apps that are currently running. Depending upon how you use your Dock, this bedrock OS feature is not necessarily a useful piece of visual information about which apps are running.

Command-Tab is Apple’s official app-switching solution, and it’s great. You can mash away on the tab key to move serially from application to application, or hold the Tab key down to scrub through the list. You can even mouse the list–and why not? You can even activate App Exposé with the tap of an arrow key.

SwitchGlass supports a ton of customization options. In addition to visual tweaks, it offers a bevy of keyboard modifiers. Read the FAQ for a full list.

Best of all, you can drag files to the app icons in the menu, and they’ll be opened in the app that you chose.

I set things up so that it’s not very Dock-like: small icons, auto-hiding, with tooltips (this was key for me). I love it.