Jump to
your haunts
The fastest way back to the folders you live in — a keyboard-first macOS menu-bar navigator.
Hit ⌃⌘Space, type a couple of letters, and land in the project — in Finder, your editor, or a terminal. Haunts learns where you actually work and is warm from the very first launch. It’s not another launcher; it’s a focused navigator that never misses.
Pre-release. v0.1.0 is in the oven — watch the repo to know when the first .dmg drops. macOS 14+ (Sonoma) · free, donationware.
Spotlight does too much. Haunts does one thing.
You don’t need a search engine to get back to the five projects you opened this week. You need a door.
It tries to be everything
Spotlight indexes apps, files, the web, maths, definitions — and somewhere in all that it gets flaky. The folder you open every day either ranks behind a screenshot or doesn’t show at all. Broad launchers like Raycast and Alfred are powerful, but they’re built to do everything, and they start cold: you have to teach them, or wire up plugins, before they know where you work.
A door that’s already warm
Haunts is a focused navigator and nothing else. It opens pre-ranked from signals already on your Mac, so your real projects sit at the top before you touch a key. It ranks by frequency × recency of where you actually go, rolls deep paths up to their git root, and gets you there — every time, in a keystroke.
Hotkey → warm list → land
No window until you summon it. No Dock icon. Just a palette over whatever you’re doing, already showing the places you mean.
Hit ⌃⌘Space
A global hotkey drops the palette over your current app. Instant, every time.
Type a couple of letters
The list opens warm and pre-ranked. A few letters narrow an already-good list — fuzzy and forgiving.
Open it your way
One keystroke takes you straight to the folder or project — in the app you meant.
Small on purpose. Sharp where it counts.
Everything here serves one job: getting you back to where you work, fast.
Learns where you work
Frecency — frequency × recency — surfaces the places you actually live in, not whatever you touched last.
Warm from launch
Seeded from existing macOS signals on first run. No cold start, no “teach it for a week” — useful immediately.
Open three ways
↩ Finder · ⌘↩ editor · ⌃↩ terminal. Same list, your choice of door.
Project-aware
Rolls deep paths up to the nearest .git root — the project you think in, not the leaf folder a file happens to sit in.
Yours to configure
Rebind the hotkey, set scan roots, pick your editor & terminal, and switch between Balanced and Frequent (z-style) ranking.
Light & dark
Follows your system appearance, with the same warm character either way.
Private & local
Everything stays on your Mac. No account, no tracking of what you open — just one anonymous install/upgrade ping.
Auto-updates
Quietly keeps itself current via Sparkle. Menu-bar only — no Dock icon, no clutter.
The soul of z
The terminal’s beloved frecency jumper (z / zoxide), set free into the GUI and the whole of your Mac.
Why not just Spotlight, Raycast, or Alfred?
They’re good tools — Haunts isn’t trying to replace them. It does the one thing they all do broadly, narrowly and well, and starts warm instead of cold.
Baked into macOS, and does almost everything: apps, files, web, maths, Siri. Doing so much is exactly why it gets unreliable for the simple job of reopening a folder.
Beautiful, extensible, racing outward into AI, stores and teams. Brilliant if you want a platform — and it starts cold until you configure it.
The power-user classic — workflows, clipboard, fuzzy everything. Deep and scriptable, but it’s breadth-and-config, and learning takes time.
The honest difference: focused, and warm on day one. Haunts is the terminal’s
z set loose in the GUI — it learns your places and just works.
Your places stay yours
Haunts is built to know where you work without telling anyone — including us.
- Everything stays on your Mac. Your folders, your ranking, your history — all local. The index never leaves your device.
- Privacy first. No account, no tracking of what you open or where you go. Just one anonymous install/upgrade event so we can count versions — no IP, no identifiers, no usage data.
- One clear permission. To open and read folder paths it asks once for macOS Automation (Finder) consent — the standard prompt you can review and revoke in System Settings.
- Open about updates. Haunts checks for its own software updates via Sparkle. That’s it.
Almost ready
Haunts is in the final stretch before its first public build. Watch the repo on GitHub to get pinged when v0.1.0 drops — it’ll be free and donationware.