Any chance this could add launching windows to specific positions/sizes and/or, more importantly, to specific spaces?

It still feels nuts to me that we have all this stuff and yet when entering/exiting 'work mode' I have to either leave everything running indefinitely or reposition all my work apps every time I launch them.

It’s an odd way of thinking about working on a computer—it’s task-based rather than app-based or document-based.

If I've one frustration with computer interfaces, dating back to the 1990s, it's this. If anything it's become worse with time as apps, both desktop and mobile though especially the latter, become more self-centric, to the point of having their own, non-filesystem-based, data silos. I understand some of the security reasons for this (apps are themselves increasingly untrusted and untrustworthy, and data-sharing is a significant risk). But it is extraordinarily frustrating when trying to work with multiple tools.

Modern MacOS is particularly pernicious in that I'm often working between multiple applications, but on the same project, and the friction of raising and lowering all app-associated windows as I cycle between these, often navigating to a workspace I'd not meant to go to, is quietly maddening.

The Linux / X-Windows notion of focus-follows-mouse addresses this somewhat. Your current app is whatever the mouse happens to be on top of. On MacOS this simply isn't available, though there are some ... hints of this. E.g., if I happen to have the mouse over a browser window I can scroll that window with the mouse. But if I then, say, hit Cmd-W to close that tab ... suddenly the actually focused app which I'd forgetten about gets a kick in its nethers. This happens to me several times a week, if not per day.

I don't know that Stapler is the true solution to this, but it does seem to track in that direction.

My mind went to http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/simstapler

This is really cool — I’ve wondered why something like this didn’t exist for a long time and I’m looking forward to checking it out.

Thanks for filling in the gaps for all of us who don’t just use one app at a time!

Nice! Similar to Brett Terpstra's Bunch[1] which has a GUI-less approach.

[1]: https://bunchapp.co/

Couldn't you do all of that with fairly simple, native Shortcuts? Or even Automator scripts?

This is cool.

I've had a desire for something like this (windows/linux) -- what would be cool is if it knew the window size and layouts?

So you could do a launch group that will do the whole desktops workspace - and can be saved (but also has a reset button to snap back to the layout if you mix things up. Support for a second desktop to launch then to - so you can throw one context cluster on each...)

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Weren't you the one who lost all their archive content? What was the timeline with all of that?

I'm always curious to know whats the motivation behind these kind of side projects ? Is it just to scratch a technical itch ? To build a product for oneself because you are not really happy with anything else on the market ? Learn a new skillset ? Enhance the resume with a new cool project ?

I like this. Curious as to how it plays along with the mess that is Stage Manager…

I wonder what the executable size of the original app was. Of course, 471 KB for a modern app, including both x86-64 and ARM64 builds, is pretty good.

Tic-tac-toe desk accessory with the minimal DA support in system 10.4 .. running right now.. that binary is close to 40 years old if I am not mistaken.

How attractive was the old UI? I really wish my mac could look just like that today. Okay okay, maybe with dark mode at night!

So, is this basically a tray editor for .sh files that just contain a list of applications/shortcuts to run?

If anyone uses KDE Plasma, you probably already know how broken activities are.

Can we make it more like Stapler?

I was disappointed it wasn't MacPlaymate he remade ;p It had a boss key that would show a spreadsheet image.