AppSwitcher – Bringing rmmd-style app switching to Windows

Hi!

I've been a Windows user since I can remember (almost 30 years). The company I worked for had been acquired by a US startup few years ago and soon after that we had to switch to Mac because that was the company standard. Honestly I was very skeptical (and scared) at that time. I was worried I'm too rusty to make such a switch.

Luckily it turned out to be a very eye opening experience. I learned a lot and actually I liked MacOS experience even more than Windows in some aspects, at least at work. Anyway, a teammate recommended rcmd to me back then and this was a game changer for me. I got used to it very quickly and then later in the evenings or over the weekends when I was using my Windows Alt-Tab felt a bit clunky.

I went for a hunt to find an alternative for Windows but I couldn't find anything useful. That's how AppSwitcher was born. It took an evening or two to run a quick PoC to see if that's even possible. The core of the app is already almost 2 years old but there was no UI so I wasn't publishing it anywhere because I felt it's an incomplete product (although it was solving the problem for me already for a while).

Recently I took an unpaid break from work (burnout symptoms) only to learn that it wasn't burnout from software development in general ;) Anyway, fast forward few weeks and I think it's ready for the broader audience. I am a power user myself so I took the not-so-common-anymore 100% offline approach. That also implies no auto update checks but that's the price I'm willing to pay. Mainly because the app involves a keyboard hook and this may sound alarming. That's why I encourage people to completely block it in the firewall (it's also covered in the docs). I have a block rule on my own machine as well. That's to make sure nothing will slip through by accident.

Let me know what you think. I'm open to any feedback. I have two bigger items on my road map: - peek mode - only switch to target app for as long as hotkey is down but switch back the moment keys are released - dynamic bindings - automatically assign open apps to free letters (similar to rcmd)

I am personally leaning towards the first one because as a long rcmd user I never used dynamic assignments except maybe first day but I wonder what's your take.