Cyclist 0.5.0

A concurrency rearchitecture: everything is measurably faster, and several long-standing races are fixed.

Faster switching

• The window sweeps behind the switcher moved off the main thread onto a background queue with per-app parallelism, and their Accessibility reads are batched four-into-one. Healthy quick taps commit in ~140ms end to end (was ~215ms); an unresponsive app now costs its own timeout instead of stalling every keystroke system-wide (~354ms -> ~190ms with three hung apps, keyboard never blocked).
• Cross-Space arrivals repaint almost immediately: window handles are cached across Spaces, so the purged-backing repaint lands in tens of milliseconds instead of a visible blank beat.
• The Space-navigation settle floor was re-measured on macOS 26.5 and dropped from 250ms to 50ms between chained hops - multi-Space journeys are up to 200ms faster per hop.

Fixed

• Rapid bouncing between a fullscreen and a normal window of the same app no longer derails to a third window or re-commits the current one.
• Bare-wallpaper arrivals under fast bouncing are gone (hardened repaint with retries and a safety repeat).
• A quick window-cycle right after a mouse app switch lists the frontmost app's windows, not the previously committed app's.
• A delayed snapshot retry can no longer replay a stale quick-tap commit over a newer one.
• The switcher panel no longer leaks - and slowly slows down - on display sleep/wake and resolution changes.
• An app whose windows are all minimized no longer pays a 150ms retry on every window-cycle press (with minimized rows hidden).
• A Space shortcut sharing a combo with a session key can no longer hijack list navigation.

Internals

• "What is the user on right now?" is answered by one current-window authority instead of three overlapping mechanisms.
• The release was audited by three independent review passes (dead code, correctness, efficiency); remaining watch-items were closed by measurement, with permanent debug telemetry (sweep timing, repaint attempts, panel selection) left in place.

Requirements

Unchanged: macOS 26 (Tahoe), Accessibility required, Screen Recording optional.

Cyclist 0.4.1

The menu bar icon becomes optional.

Optional menu bar icon

• Settings > General gains "Show menu bar icon" (showMenuBarIcon in defaults). Cyclist keeps running without it; the change applies live, no restart.
• Ways back while the icon is hidden: hold the switcher open and press , to open Settings (Cmd+Q there quits), or simply relaunch Cyclist - reopening the app now always presents the Settings window.

Requirements

Unchanged: macOS 26 (Tahoe), Accessibility required, Screen Recording optional.

Cyclist 0.4.0

The switcher grows a real Settings window and rebindable shortcuts, and configuration moves to standard user defaults.

Settings window

• The status menu slims to Settings, About, and Quit; everything else lives in a two-column Settings window. Cmd+, opens it while the switcher is held open, and Cmd+W / Cmd+Q work inside it.
• The less obvious settings carry an info dot with a quick hover explanation.
• Launch at Login lives there too and resyncs itself after changes made in System Settings > General > Login Items.
• New About window with version and project links.

Rebindable shortcuts

• The four global bindings - open switcher, cycle app windows, previous/next Space - are recordable in Settings: click the shortcut, press the new keys; Esc cancels. Shift stays the reverse key, so a binding needs a real modifier and shift-variants count as duplicates.
• Keyboard Space navigation has an on/off switch alongside the trackpad-swipe one.

Configuration is user defaults

• Every setting is a key under io.github.pszypowicz.Cyclist - the README documents the full table. defaults write applies to the running app immediately, rebinds included.
• Breaking: the ~/.config/cyclist/cyclist.toml file is no longer read. Move any non-default values to defaults write (the README table maps them one to one).
• The Enabled switch is gone: quitting Cyclist is the disable, and every native shortcut returns the moment it exits.

Fixes

• The window-title cache evicts closed windows instead of growing for the whole boot session.
• An AeroSpace request timeout no longer completes twice and desyncs the workspace cache refresh.
• A shortcut recording now dies with the Settings window instead of swallowing keystrokes system-wide.
• Less per-event work on the keystroke reject path in the event tap.

Requirements

Unchanged: macOS 26 (Tahoe), Accessibility required, Screen Recording optional.

Cyclist 0.3.1

Adds keyboard control of the open switcher list and evens out the panel spacing.

While the switcher is held open

• Up/Down and vim j/k move the selection.
• q quits the selected app, like native Cmd+Tab's Q; its rows leave the list and the session continues on the rest. Finder is gated the way the Dock and AltTab gate it - quittable only after defaults write com.apple.finder QuitMenuItem -bool true, otherwise it beeps and stays.
• w closes the selected window.

Quit and close edit the live session in place: the selection clamps to a survivor, and the session ends only when nothing remains.

Fixes

• The panel now keeps even top and bottom margins as the list grows (the height calculation was undercounting inter-row spacing and one content inset), and a visible panel resizes when rows are removed mid-session.
• A brand-new window is ranked on its creation event, so a window revealed by a close or quit is never briefly unranked.

Requirements

Unchanged: macOS 13+, Accessibility required, Screen Recording optional.

Cyclist 0.3.0

Third beta. The switcher learns which window you used last, AeroSpace workspaces join Space navigation, and the hard signals moved to the WindowServer.

AeroSpace integration (optional)

• With AeroSpace running, Ctrl+Left/Right walks workspace 1 ... N, fullscreen Spaces as one ring: workspace steps go over AeroSpace's socket, and crossing from a fullscreen Space lands on the adjacent workspace. Windows parked in hidden workspaces show as workspace N switcher rows and commit through a single AeroSpace focus command.
• Detection is automatic, with a menu-bar toggle (default on). AeroSpace absent, quit, killed, or disabled via aerospace enable off - each reverts to plain native behavior before the next keypress, push-detected over the socket.

Window recency

• The Cmd+Tab quick tap switches to the previous window, wherever it lives - bouncing between two windows of one app now works, across Spaces and workspaces alike.
• Rows within an app sort by focus recency, and Cmd+` cycles in most-recently-used order and reaches windows in other Spaces (native fullscreen included), with a quick tap bouncing between the app's last two windows.

Faster and more precise

• Focus tracking, Space-change detection, and real-window classification come from the WindowServer notification stream - immune to busy apps and broken Accessibility trees.
• Space navigation is event-gated at a measured 250ms settle instead of a blanket 1.15s floor: sustained Ctrl+arrow chains step about 4x faster and arrivals confirm in ~60ms. The measurement mode ships in the binary (Cyclist --measure-swipe-floor) for revalidating after macOS updates.
• Fullscreen apps no longer produce a phantom duplicate switcher row (the fullscreen toolbar companion window is filtered out via WindowServer records).

Requirements

Unchanged: macOS 13+, Accessibility required, Screen Recording optional (live titles for other-Space windows). The AeroSpace integration needs no additional permissions.

Cyclist 0.2.0

Second beta. Everything since the text-only Cmd+Tab MVP.

Highlights

• Every window is its own switcher row (App - Window title), including windows in other Spaces and native fullscreen; selecting one jumps straight to its Space. Live titles for other-Space windows with the optional Screen Recording permission.
• Cmd+` cycles the frontmost app's windows, minimized ones included.
• Ctrl+Left/Right walks Spaces in Mission Control order - instantly, no animation - and focuses the top window when landing on a desktop. Native trackpad gestures are untouched; quit Cyclist and the native shortcuts work as before.

Reliability on macOS 26 (Tahoe)

• Space switches no longer intermittently land on an empty desktop: synthetic swipe posting is paced and coalesced around a measured compositor limitation, arrival is verified against live state, and window focus follows the system's space-change notification, so keyboard focus lands together with the visual switch.
• Logging moved to the unified logging system (subsystem io.github.pszypowicz.Cyclist). Debug diagnostics, including a pixel-level transition sentinel, cost nothing unless armed with log stream --level debug or log config.

Removed

• Built-in 3-finger swipe handling - trackpad gestures belong to macOS.
• The --goto-space CLI.

Requirements

macOS 13 or later; Accessibility permission required, Screen Recording optional. The app is signed with a personal development certificate, so installs outside the Homebrew tap need a manual Gatekeeper exception.