AltTab and Contexts alternative: a radial menu for app switching on Mac

If you have ever typed "Cmd+Tab replacement Mac" into a search bar, the two names that come back are AltTab and Contexts. Both have earned that spot. AltTab is the open-source one — free, GPL-3.0, hosted at github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos, with over seven million downloads and a release cadence that puts most paid Mac apps to shame. Contexts is the polished commercial one — $9.99 one-time at contexts.co, with search, an enhanced Cmd+Tab, and an auto-hiding sidebar grouped by Space.

They both solve the same problem the same way. Cmd+Tab is a linear strip of app icons that gets unusable past five apps; AltTab and Contexts replace it with a better list. Per-window thumbnails. Search. Filtering by Space. Sorting that does not silently shuffle on you. If your complaint with Cmd+Tab is "it's the wrong list," either tool fixes that.

This post is for people whose complaint is different. The complaint is not "the list is wrong." It is "I do not want to look at a list at all to switch to my browser."

The "better list" approach has a ceiling

Every list-based switcher — Cmd+Tab, AltTab, Contexts, Mission Control — assumes the same interaction loop. Trigger a UI. Visually scan. Pick. Confirm. The improvements are all in the scanning step: bigger thumbnails, per-window granularity, search to filter, grouping by Space. Useful. Real. Still scanning.

For the seventy or eighty open windows you have at any given moment, scanning is the right answer. You cannot remember the spatial position of every window, you do not want to. AltTab is genuinely great here — its window-level switcher with previews is what Cmd+Tab should have been a decade ago.

But scanning is the wrong answer for the eight apps you bounce between every day. You do not need to see Figma to know where Figma is. You already know. Asking your eyes to confirm what your hand already knows is a small tax, paid every time, hundreds of times a day.

Recognition beats recall. Direction beats name. That is the whole pitch of a radial menu: hold a trigger, flick toward the wedge, release. The menu does not exist to be looked at — it exists to be a target your hand throws toward. After a week, you stop watching the wedges appear. The flick happens before they do.

What AltTab is genuinely the best at

Do not move off AltTab for any of this. These are the things it has spent years getting right and a radial menu does not even attempt:

• Per-window switching. Three Chrome windows, four terminal windows, two Figma files. AltTab shows each window as its own switcher item with a live thumbnail. Nothing else on macOS does this as cleanly.
• The long tail of open windows. If you have forty windows open right now, you cannot put forty wedges in a radial menu. AltTab handles forty effortlessly.
• Hidden-window recovery. The window you minimized two hours ago that you cannot remember the name of. Visual scan finds it. A radial menu cannot.
• Free and open source. No license server, no account, no Pro tier, no telemetry. GPL-3.0 means you can audit it. For a tool that runs in your input loop all day, that matters.
• Customizability. AltTab has more preferences than most paid Mac apps — appearance, blacklists, multiple shortcut sets, per-Space filtering. Power users live in those settings.

What Contexts is genuinely the best at

Contexts is doing something slightly different from AltTab, and it is worth being precise:

• Fast Search. Hit a modifier and one or two characters, jump to that window. For people who think in app-name fragments, this is faster than visual scanning.
• The Sidebar. Hover the screen edge, get a list of every window grouped by Space. It is the closest thing macOS has to a Windows-style taskbar without becoming Windows.
• Polished commercial software. Settings UI is unified, support is responsive, updates are signed and notarized through normal channels. A different shape of trust than open source, but trust nonetheless.
• Multi-display awareness. Window grouping by Space and display works the way you expect on a three-monitor setup, which is not always true of free alternatives.

If your complaint with Cmd+Tab is "I want a sidebar I can hover, plus search, plus a smarter Cmd+Tab in one app," Contexts is purpose-built for that. $9.99 is fair value for what it does.

What a radial menu is genuinely better at

This is where the shape of the task is different. A radial menu does not compete with AltTab or Contexts on per-window switching — it would lose. It competes on the eight or twelve apps that account for eighty percent of your switches.

• The short head, by direction. Browser, code editor, terminal, messaging, music, notes, design tool, mail. Eight wedges, eight directions. After a few days, your hand picks them without your eyes confirming.
• Mouse-hand triggers. Bind the trigger to a mouse side button. Now you switch apps without your right hand leaving the mouse — no Cmd+Tab, no Ctrl+Space, no reach. AltTab and Contexts assume keyboard-hand triggers by default.
• Sub-menus for grouped actions. A "messaging" wedge can fan out to Slack / Discord / iMessage. A "design" wedge can fan out to Figma / Sketch / a pinned project file. Nested directions still beat a list.
• More than just apps. A wedge can be an Apple Shortcut, a clipboard ring, an emoji picker, or a pinned document. AltTab and Contexts switch between things you already have open. A radial menu also does things.
• Context profiles. Home Wi-Fi loads a different menu than office Wi-Fi. External display connected? Different layout. Switching changes shape with where you are.

Side by side

The recognition-versus-recall split

Interaction designers have a phrase for this: "recognition over recall." It is from Nielsen's heuristics and it shows up in every menu-design paper for a reason. Recognition (seeing a thing and knowing it) is faster and lower-effort than recall (producing a thing from memory). Most of computing has been a slow march from recall toward recognition — command lines became menus, menus became icons, icons became thumbnails.

App switchers are the last holdout. Cmd+Tab is recognition (you see the icons) but the icons all look the same. AltTab is better recognition (you see the thumbnails). Contexts adds recall (you can type the name). All three still ask your eyes to do work.

A radial menu is recognition of a different kind: positional. Once your hand knows that "browser is up-and-right," you do not need to see anything to confirm it. The menu can render entirely off-screen and you would still hit the right wedge. That is the property that makes radial menus feel fast — not the visual design, but the fact that the visual is optional after week one.

This is also why a radial menu loses badly above twelve items. Position-recognition is a finite resource. Eight directions is comfortable, twelve is the upper limit, sixteen is too many. Past that, you are back to scanning, and scanning is what AltTab is already great at. There is no point trying to fit your forty-window day into a wedge.

The combined setup

This is the configuration we see most heavy users land on after a few weeks of trying every option:

• Cmd+Tab stays bound to AltTab or Contexts. Use it for the long tail — the window you minimized this morning, the seventh Chrome window, anything with "show me everything open" energy.
• A separate trigger — mouse side button, F19, or a hotkey that does not collide — opens Swik. Use it for the eight apps you reach for by reflex, plus your three most-used Apple Shortcuts and the clipboard ring.

There is no conflict because there is no overlap in task shape. AltTab handles the breadth; the radial menu handles the depth-of-frequency. If you have ever felt the friction of "Cmd+Tab, scan, find Figma, hit return" twenty times an hour, that is the friction the radial menu deletes — without taking anything away from the per-window switching that AltTab does well.

When to skip the radial menu entirely

Honest version. Do not add a radial menu if:

• You rarely use a mouse during focused work — keyboard-only people get less out of mouse-side-button triggers.
• Your day is shaped around per-window switching across many windows of the same app. AltTab is built for that; a radial menu is not.
• You already use Contexts' Fast Search and feel zero friction. If the typing is invisible to you, do not fix what is not broken.
• You only have three or four apps open at a time. Cmd+Tab is fine for three apps; that is what it was designed for.

When to add one

Add a radial menu alongside AltTab or Contexts if:

• You catch yourself thinking "I just want to switch to my browser, why is this taking three keystrokes."
• You design, edit, or browse with a mouse in your dominant hand and the keyboard feels like a detour.
• You have three or four Apple Shortcuts you wish were physical buttons — toggling Do Not Disturb, starting a focus timer, opening a saved window arrangement.
• You want app switching that changes shape with your environment — different wedges at home versus at the office.

The goal is not to retire a tool that already works. AltTab and Contexts are both legitimately good and we will not pretend otherwise. The goal is to notice that "switch to my browser" and "find the window I lost" are different jobs, and the second job has been getting all the new tools while the first job has been stuck with Cmd+Tab.

A radial menu is the tool for the first job. Pair it with the better list of your choice and you have both jobs covered.