Glossary: pie menus, marking menus, and radial launchers

This is a single-page reference for every term we use when we talk about radial menus on macOS. If you've seen a word on another Swik post and weren't sure what it meant, it's defined here. Most of these definitions come straight from the interaction-design literature — we've cited the original papers where relevant.

Anatomy of a radial menu

Before the definitions, a labeled diagram. Most of the terms below refer to one of the components on this picture.

Terms, alphabetically

Context-aware profile

A radial menu layout that swaps automatically based on the environment — the Wi-Fi network, the active display, the frontmost app, or the time of day. The same trigger can produce "work apps at the office" and "home apps on my couch" without any manual switch. See also: trigger.

Dead zone

The small circle at the center of a radial menu where no wedge is selected. Releasing in the dead zone dismisses the menu. The dead zone prevents accidental selections from tiny cursor jitters.

Dwell

The short pause (typically 200–400ms) between opening a radial menu and committing to a wedge. In marking menus, a long enough dwell switches the user from expert mode (gesture only) to novice mode (full menu drawn). The term comes from Kurtenbach's marking menu research.

Fitts's Law

A 1954 model by Paul Fitts that predicts the time to hit a target. Formally: MT = a + b · log₂(D/W + 1) where D is distance and W is target width. Radial menus exploit it by keeping D small and W effectively infinite along the angular direction. This is the single most-cited explanation for why radial menus are fast.

Flick

A short, directional cursor movement that commits a selection. The flick doesn't have to reach the wedge — crossing into the wedge's angular range is enough. Flicks are what turn a pie menu into a gesture. See also: marking menu.

Gesture launcher

An umbrella term for any macOS app launcher triggered by a gesture — three-finger swipe, mouse side-button, trackpad force-click, hot corner. Radial launchers are a subset of gesture launchers. BetterTouchTool is the most general-purpose gesture launcher on the Mac.

Hold-and-release

The core interaction of most modern radial menus. You press the trigger, hold while moving toward the target wedge, and release to commit. Used in Maya, Blender, Mass Effect, GTA V, and every serious radial launcher on macOS. Also called "chord and flick" or "press-move-release."

Marking menu

A radial menu that also works as a pure gesture. If the user flicks before a short dwell elapses, the menu never draws — the direction of the flick is the selection. If the user pauses past the dwell threshold, the full menu appears. Introduced by Gordon Kurtenbach in his 1993 PhD thesis at the University of Toronto.

Nested menu / sub-menu

A second ring of wedges that opens from a parent wedge. Nesting lets a radial menu scale past the ~12-item limit of a single ring. Swik supports nested sub-menus; Pie Menu and Pieoneer generally don't.

Novice mode / expert mode

Two interaction modes of a marking menu. In novice mode, the menu is drawn after a short dwell — the user sees their options. In expert mode, the user flicks immediately and the menu never draws — the gesture alone selects. Marking menus progress users naturally from novice to expert through repetition.

Pie menu

The original name (Callahan et al., 1988) for a menu whose options are arranged as wedges around a central point. The term is older than "radial menu" but the two are used interchangeably today. Strictly speaking, a pie menu always draws its wedges; a marking menu can hide them.

Profile

A saved radial menu layout. Swik lets you have multiple profiles and switch between them manually or automatically (via context-aware triggers). A profile might be "work apps," "home apps," or "design apps."

Radial launcher

A macOS app whose primary purpose is to launch other apps or run actions via a radial menu interface. Current examples: Swik, Pie Menu by Noteifyapp, Pieoneer, and the radial feature inside BetterTouchTool.

Radial menu

The general term for any menu arranged around a central point. Pie menus and marking menus are both radial menus. "Radial menu" is the term that's dominant outside academia; "pie menu" is more common in the interaction-design literature.

Ring

A single concentric band of wedges. Most radial menus have one ring. Swik's sub-menus live on a second (outer) ring. Some marking menu implementations (Kurtenbach's hierarchical menus, for example) chain rings together via additional flicks.

Spatial memory

The cognitive system that remembers where things are in 2D space. Radial menus exploit spatial memory ("northeast is Figma") while command palettes like Raycast exploit semantic memory ("type f-i-g"). The two systems coexist without interfering, which is why many power users run both kinds of launcher.

Trigger

The input that opens a radial menu. Common triggers: a hotkey that's held down (F19 works well because it's unused by macOS), a mouse side button, a trackpad four-finger force-click, or a screen hot corner. A good radial menu supports multiple triggers so you can pick the one that fits your hardware.

Wedge

A single slice of a radial menu — one action per wedge. In Swik, a wedge can hold an app, a file, an Apple Shortcut, a URL, or a sub-menu. Most ring designs work well with 4 to 10 wedges; past 12 the angular targets get too narrow.

Further reading

If you want to dig into the primary literature behind these terms, the history post has the full paper list with citations. The two most useful starting points are Callahan et al. (1988) for pie menus and Kurtenbach's 1993 thesis for marking menus. Both are freely available online.

For a friendlier introduction, our "what is a pie menu" post covers the same ground in narrative form.