A radial tab switcher for Arc, Safari, and Chrome on Mac

Every modern browser on macOS lets you jump to a tab with Cmd+1 through Cmd+9. It works in Safari. It works in Chrome. It works in Arc. It is the single best-known browser keyboard shortcut on the platform.

It is also positional. Cmd+3 means "the third tab from the left," and the left edge of your tab strip moves every time you open or close anything. The tab that was Cmd+3 this morning is Cmd+5 by lunch and gone by Friday. You end up looking at the bar to count, which defeats the entire reason a keyboard shortcut exists.

This post sketches out a different shape for the same problem: a radial menu where each wedge opens a specific URL. Flick right for GitHub. Flick up for Linear. Flick down-left for the team Notion. The wedge is bound to the destination, not the position — so it lands on the same page no matter how many tabs you have open or what order they are in.

One thing to be upfront about: Swik does not integrate with browsers directly. It does not read your tab list, it does not know which Space you are in, and it cannot tell whether a given URL is already open. What it can do is trigger an Apple Shortcut, and the Shortcuts app's built-in Open URLs action will do the right thing in whatever browser you have set as default. That is the whole mechanism. Everything below is a layout you can build on top of it.

Why "Nth tab" is the wrong question

The mental model behind Cmd+1..9 is that your tabs are numbered. They are not — they are ordered, which is different. A number is stable; an order is constantly being rewritten by your own clicks. If you have ever typed Cmd+5 for a calendar tab and landed on a release-notes page from yesterday, you have hit the gap.

Arc tried to fix this with pinned tabs. Pinned tabs in Arc live above the divider, do not get closed when you tidy up, and stay in the same order between sessions. That is a real improvement. But you still reach them with Cmd+1..9 — meaning you still have to know which pin is in which slot, and you still have to count past the unpinned tabs above. The position lives in your head, and it has to match what the browser is showing.

A radial menu inverts the relationship. You do not address the wedge by what it currently points at — you address it by direction. East is always east, even if the URL bound to it has nothing to do with east. After a week your hand learns "GitHub is right" the same way it learned "save is Cmd+S." The wedge is the address.

How Swik opens a URL

There is no "open in browser" wedge type in Swik. Instead, you use the Apple Shortcut wedge (Pro), and the Shortcut itself does the opening. The smallest possible Shortcut for this is two blocks:

1. Text → put the URL in here, e.g. https://github.com.
2. Open URLs → takes the text from the previous step.

That is the entire automation. Save the Shortcut as "Open GitHub," bind a Swik wedge to it, and a flick in that direction launches the URL in your default browser. Repeat for every destination you want on the menu.

If you want a specific URL to always open in a non-default browser — say, you want internal admin tools to land in Chrome even though Safari is your default — replace Open URLs with Open URLs in and pick the browser. You can also use a tiny AppleScript via Shortcuts' Run AppleScript action:

tell application "Arc"
    activate
    tell front window to make new tab with properties {URL:"https://linear.app"}
end tell

Swap Arc for Safari or Google Chrome as needed. Each of the major macOS browsers responds to roughly the same scripting verbs; the differences are in how they handle Spaces, profiles, and pinned tabs.

A starter layout for daily browsing

Eight wedges is enough for the URLs you visit twenty times a day. Anything past that should probably go in a sub-menu, because eight is the limit before you start looking at the menu instead of flicking through it.

Each wedge points at one Apple Shortcut, each Shortcut opens one URL. There is no per-browser wiring beyond choosing whether you want every wedge to honour your default browser or pin some destinations to a specific app.

Arc, specifically

A note on Arc before we go further. The Browser Company stopped active feature development on Arc in 2025 and now ships almost everything new in its successor, Dia. Existing Arc installs still launch, still load pages, and still respond to URL schemes — and a lot of designers and developers are still using it daily. A Swik wedge that says "open this URL in Arc" will continue to work as long as Arc itself does. If and when you migrate to Dia (or back to Chrome, or to Safari), you change one Shortcut step and the wedge itself stays the same.

Two Arc-specific patterns worth pointing at:

• Pinned tabs by URL. Arc's pinned tabs are stable, but reaching them still costs Cmd+1..9 and a count. Bind each pinned tab's URL to its own wedge instead. The menu becomes a one-flick analogue of your pinned strip.
• Spaces via destination. Arc Spaces are not exposed to Apple Shortcuts directly, but each Space owns its own URLs. Opening a URL that belongs to a Space activates that Space as a side effect. So a "Work GitHub" wedge lands you in your Work Space; a "Personal Mastodon" wedge lands you in Personal. The Space switch is a free side effect of going to the destination.

Safari and Chrome

Safari's Tab Groups are the closest analogue to Arc Spaces. Like Spaces, they are not first-class in Apple Shortcuts, but the same trick applies — opening a URL pinned to a Tab Group activates that group. A wedge per Tab-Group-defining URL gives you a one-flick group switcher.

Chrome is the simplest case because it has the least opinion. Open URLs in Chrome will create or reuse a tab, whatever your settings say. If you run multiple Chrome profiles (work / personal / a client account), use Run AppleScript with Chrome's make new window with properties {profile:"Work"} verb — though be warned that profile scripting in Chrome has historically been finicky, and you may prefer to launch Chrome with a --profile-directory flag from a Shell Script step.

For both Safari and Chrome, the radial menu fills the same gap as in Arc: it converts a positional shortcut into a destination shortcut. Cmd+1 means "first tab"; the wedge means "the inbox." You will not have to retrain that mapping when your tab order shifts.

Focusing the browser, not just the URL

A subtle but useful point: Open URLs activates the destination app. So a wedge bound to "open Linear" not only opens the Linear URL but also brings the browser to the foreground, even if you were buried in Slack or a terminal. That makes the radial menu function as a hybrid app-switcher and tab-switcher in one motion. Flicking east does not just send you to the GitHub URL — it puts you in the browser, on that page, in one gesture.

If you want the inverse — focus the browser without changing tabs — bind an Apple Shortcut whose only step is Open App → Arc (or Safari, or Chrome). That gives you a "just bring the browser forward" wedge, which pairs nicely with the destination wedges around it.

A few things to know

Swik is not a tab manager. It cannot list your open tabs, deduplicate them, or close anything. It only opens URLs. If you want full tab-management features (search across all open tabs, save sessions, suspend background tabs), you want a browser extension; the radial menu sits beside that, not in place of it.

Default-browser behaviour applies. A wedge using plain Open URLs opens in whatever you have set as your default browser in System Settings. If you switch defaults, every plain wedge follows you. If you want a specific wedge to ignore the default, use Open URLs in and pin the browser explicitly.

Apple Shortcuts is a Pro feature in Swik. You can build the layout above with five free wedges if you want to try the shape first. To run more than five wedges or to bind any wedge to an Apple Shortcut at all, you need the $9 Pro upgrade. There is no subscription.

Context profiles help. Swik can swap profiles based on Wi-Fi network, external display, or time of day. A common setup: one URL layout for office Wi-Fi (work tools), a different layout for home Wi-Fi (personal email, side-project repos, RSS), auto-switched. The wedge directions stay the same; the URLs behind them change with where you are.