A radial menu for 1Password: faster vault access on Mac

1Password's Quick Access is one of the better keyboard-driven launchers on the Mac. You press Shift+Cmd+Space, type two or three letters of a vault item, and you're filling. For most logins, that's already the right interaction.

But there's a tier of credentials below that — three or four logins you fill ten times a day, every day. The work email, the staging dashboard, the analytics console, the VPN. For these, even Quick Access is friction. Hand off the mouse, press a hotkey, type two letters, press Enter, autofill. A radial menu can collapse that to a single flick — without ever touching the credentials themselves.

This post walks through a Swik layout for hourly-use logins. Two important things up front: Swik has no built-in 1Password integration and never will, because that would be the wrong place for secrets. And 1Password does not currently ship native Apple Shortcuts actions, which sounds like a problem but actually has a clean workaround using the 1Password CLI. Both points matter for the design.

Why a wedge beats Quick Access for the hourly tier

Quick Access is a typing tool. It's brilliant for the hundred-plus items in a real vault, because typing scales with vocabulary. But typing is only fast when your hands are already on the keyboard. When you're in a browser tab clicking through a CRM with the mouse in your right hand, opening Quick Access means moving your right hand off the mouse, hitting a three-key chord, typing letters, and confirming.

A wedge does the same job differently. You're already holding the mouse. You press the side button, flick down-left, and the fill happens. There is no recall step because the wedge is in a fixed position. After a week, you stop looking at the menu — the direction is the credential.

The ceiling of this approach is low on purpose. You don't put eighty logins on wedges. You put the four or five you fill constantly, leave everything else in 1Password's vault, and let Quick Access handle the long tail. Same two-layer logic as a typed launcher next to a radial one — recall for breadth, reflex for frequency.

The simple version: a wedge that opens Quick Access

The smallest possible setup, and a perfectly reasonable place to stop, is one wedge that sends the Quick Access hotkey. You bind a Swik wedge to send Shift+Cmd+Space — that's the default 1Password Quick Access trigger on Mac, and it's reassignable inside 1Password's preferences if you've moved it.

What you gain: you can keep the mouse in hand, flick once, and 1Password's search box is up. What you don't gain: per-item targeting. You still type two letters to pick the right login. For most people, that's a fair trade — the wedge replaces the keyboard reach without putting any 1Password data inside Swik.

This setup is genuinely zero-risk because the wedge is just a keystroke. No credentials touch Swik's storage, no automation runs, no extra tools are installed. If you only do one thing from this post, do this one.

The targeted version: wedges that fill specific items

The richer setup uses 1Password's command-line tool, op, wrapped inside Apple Shortcuts. The reason for the wrapping is that 1Password does not currently ship dedicated Apple Shortcuts actions — there is no "Get Item" or "Fill Login" tile in the Shortcuts library. There has been a community feature request open for this for years; it is not shipped today. What does work is a Shortcut with a single Run Shell Script action that calls op, retrieves a specific item, and pipes the result somewhere useful (typically into the clipboard for a brief moment, then cleared, or — more cleanly — into a fill flow you've already wired).

The setup looks roughly like this:

• Install the 1Password CLI from the developer site and enable the desktop-app integration in 1Password's Settings → Developer pane. With this on, op requests authenticate through the desktop app, which means Touch ID prompts you, not a hidden script.
• Create one Apple Shortcut per login you want on a wedge. Inside each, a single Run Shell Script action calls op item get for that specific item.
• In Swik, add a wedge of type Shortcut and pick that Apple Shortcut. The Shortcut runner is a Pro feature in Swik.

Now flicking that wedge fires the Shortcut, which calls op, which prompts 1Password (Touch ID) before doing anything. After authentication, the credential is delivered to wherever your Shortcut is configured to put it. Crucially, Swik never sees the password. It only saw the Shortcut name.

An hourly-logins layout

A reasonable layout for the four-to-six logins you actually fill all day:

Eight wedges, two sub-menus. The hourly tier is one flick away. The "I use this twice a week" tier is a flick plus another flick. The whole long tail is still where it always was, in the 1Password vault, behind Quick Access.

Context profiles: a different vault face per environment

The credentials you reach for on work Wi-Fi are not the credentials you reach for on home Wi-Fi. Swik supports context-aware profiles that swap the entire menu based on conditions — current Wi-Fi network, connected display, time of day. A common arrangement:

• Office Wi-Fi profile. The work email, staging, analytics, VPN, internal admin. This is the layout you live in nine to five.
• Home Wi-Fi profile. Personal email, banking, the streaming services your household keeps logging out of. None of the work logins are even visible.
• Coffee-shop profile. Triggered by an SSID prefix you've used before. A stripped-down layout with just personal email and the password manager. Less surface area for a thumb to flick the wrong way.

This is helpful for ergonomic reasons but also for a quiet security reason: the work credentials are simply not on the menu when you're not at work. There's nothing to flick when your hand is in the wrong place. More on profile triggers here.

Security: what stays in 1Password, what doesn't

The whole design of this post is built around one rule: secrets do not enter Swik. To make that concrete, here's what each kind of wedge does and doesn't store.

• Hotkey wedges (the Quick Access trigger). These store a key combination. Nothing else. Sending Shift+Cmd+Space doesn't reveal what 1Password does with it.
• Shortcut wedges. These store the name of an Apple Shortcut. The Shortcut itself runs in Apple's sandbox and calls op, which authenticates through the 1Password desktop app. Touch ID prompts before any retrieval. The wedge does not see the credential at any point.
• App and pinned-doc wedges. Open the 1Password app or a saved 1Password URL. Same as a Dock click. No data passes through Swik.

And, just as importantly, here is what you should never use for credentials:

• The clipboard ring. Swik keeps the last few text snippets you copied so you can paste them with one flick. That's great for a meeting URL or an address. It is not a place for a password — even briefly. If you copy a credential by accident, clear it from the ring immediately and treat it as exposed.
• Text-insert wedges. A text-insert wedge stores literal text in Swik's settings file. Useful for an email signature or a frequently typed snippet. Categorically not for secrets. There is no encryption layer here that resembles a password manager.

If a wedge looks like a fast way to "just put my password in there," that's the moment to step back. The whole point of the design is that the password lives in 1Password and the wedge is a remote control. Flatten that and you've turned your settings file into a credentials file.

What this setup doesn't try to do

A few honest limits, so nobody is surprised:

Swik isn't filling forms itself. The Shortcut you wire to a wedge does whatever your Shortcut is configured to do. If you set it up to copy a credential to the clipboard, that credential sits there until something else overwrites it or until the OS clears the pasteboard. The 1Password desktop app's Universal Autofill is a much better fill experience than anything you can build with a clipboard-based Shortcut, and there's nothing wrong with treating the radial-menu approach as an extra layer rather than a replacement.

The CLI dependency is real. The targeted approach assumes you've installed and authenticated op, and that you're comfortable enabling the desktop integration. That's a setup tax. If you don't want to take it on, the simple version (a wedge that opens Quick Access) gets you most of the speed benefit for none of the configuration.

1Password may eventually ship native Shortcuts actions. If they do, the targeted approach above gets simpler — replace the Run Shell Script action with the official Get Item action and you're done. Until then, the CLI is the bridge.

Wedges aren't the place for OTP. If you use 1Password's one-time-password feature, keep generating those inside 1Password where Touch ID gates them. A wedge that fired an OTP fill might feel slick, but you've just made a one-flick path to a code that exists to slow attackers down.