SlideScroll

A scrolling window manager for macOS. Your windows live on an endless horizontal strip. Opening one never squeezes the others.

Download · Features · Setup · Shortcuts · FAQ · Roadmap

▶ Watch the demo on YouTube (40 seconds)

---

Tiling window managers split your screen into ever-smaller tiles. SlideScroll does the opposite: every window is a column on a strip that runs past the edges of the screen, at the width you chose. Open a window and it slides in beside the one you're using; nothing else changes size. Swipe with four fingers or press a shortcut to scroll the strip, the way niri and PaperWM work on Linux.

SlideScroll is free, open source, and a native Mac app, with no Electron, no web views and no account. Its only network access is checking GitHub for updates, which Settings can turn off.

Features

• Scrolling strip. Columns keep their width. Scroll by trackpad swipe (1:1 with your fingers, then it snaps to a column), by shortcut, or by clicking or Cmd-Tabbing to a window.
• Widths that make sense. Cycle through ¼, ⅓, ½, ⅔, ¾ of the screen, go full width and back, centre a column, or nudge it wider and narrower.
• Stacks. Put several windows in one column, one above the other. Drag a window onto another to stack it, drag the edge between them to share the height, or pop it back out.
• Tabs. Turn a stack into a tabbed column with a clickable tab bar. Native macOS tabs (Finder, Terminal, Ghostty, …) stay in their column too.
• Pinning. Keep a column at the left or right edge while the rest scrolls past.
• Always know where you are. While you move, a row of app icons shows every column, with yours highlighted; click one to jump there. The menu bar menu lists every window too.
• Undo. ⌃⌥Z puts back the last layout change, whether a shortcut or a drag did it, and ⌃⌥⇧Z redoes it. ⌃⌥⇥ jumps back to the window you were just in.
• Multiple displays. Each display has its own strip. Send windows between displays with a shortcut or by dragging, and nothing spills onto the neighbouring screen.
• Plays well with macOS. Ignores full-screen apps and other Spaces, floats dialogs and fixed-size windows, survives sleep, locking and displays coming and going, and remembers your layout across restarts.
• Every shortcut is yours. Remap any action in Settings, with two shortcuts per action. Works on any keyboard layout.
• Scriptable. Every action has a slidescroll:// URL and a command-line name, for Raycast, Alfred, Shortcuts and scripts. See Scripting.
• Widths per app. New windows of an app can open at their own width, say a third for the terminal and two thirds for the browser.
• Safe. Quitting, pausing or even a crash puts every window back on screen.
• Tells you what's wrong. Settings → General checks for macOS settings that get in the way, live, and one click opens the right System Settings pane.

Requirements

• macOS 13 Ventura or later
• A Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or later)
• A built-in trackpad or Magic Trackpad for swipes (everything else works with a keyboard and mouse)

Install

Paste this into Terminal. It downloads the latest release, checks it against the release's checksums, puts SlideScroll in Applications and opens it; run it again to update. It's site/install.sh if you'd like to read it first.

curl -fsSL https://slidescroll.majnioui.me/install.sh | sh

Or install the disk image by hand:

1. Download SlideScroll-<version>.dmg from the latest release.
2. Open it and drag SlideScroll into Applications.
3. Open SlideScroll from Applications.

[!NOTE] The disk image isn't notarized yet (the Terminal install above avoids this). macOS says it "could not verify" SlideScroll the first time you open it. Click Done, then go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down to "SlideScroll" was blocked and click Open Anyway. Or run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/SlideScroll.app once.

Or build it from source with Homebrew (it builds with the Swift that comes with the Xcode Command Line Tools):

brew tap majnioui/slidescroll https://github.com/majnioui/SlideScroll
brew install slidescroll

Homebrew prints how to link it into Applications. Update with brew upgrade slidescroll; each build has a new signature, so allow Accessibility again afterwards.

Updates

SlideScroll checks for a new release shortly after it starts and every six hours. When there is one, it downloads it in the background, checks it against the release's checksums, and offers Restart to Update in its menu and in Settings → General. Restarting puts every window back on screen, swaps in the new version and opens it. Turn the checks off, or check now, in Settings → General.

Releases are signed with the same certificate, so updates keep the Accessibility permission. Builds signed ad hoc (your own, or Homebrew's) need it again after each update: SlideScroll clears the old build's entry from the list by itself, so just turn SlideScroll on again when macOS asks.

First launch

SlideScroll moves other apps' windows, which needs the Accessibility permission. On first launch macOS asks for it: open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility, turn on SlideScroll, and it starts right away. No restart, and no other permissions: no Screen Recording, no Input Monitoring, no disabling SIP.

SlideScroll lives in the menu bar, as an icon of three columns side by side. Its menu has Pause, Settings… and Quit. To start it with your Mac, turn on Launch SlideScroll at login in Settings → General.

Recommended macOS settings

A few macOS features fight over the same gestures and windows. SlideScroll checks them in Settings → General and lists any problem there, with a button to the System Settings pane that fixes it. It never changes a macOS setting itself.

Setting	Where	Set it to	Why
Swipe between full-screen applications	Trackpad → More Gestures	Off	SlideScroll scrolls with four fingers. macOS often keeps acting on four fingers even when this shows "three", and a fast four-finger swipe lands as three first. Switch desktops with ⌃← / ⌃→ or Mission Control
Drag windows to screen edges to tile	Desktop & Dock → Windows	Off	macOS snaps dropped windows into tiles
Drag windows to menu bar to fill screen	Desktop & Dock → Windows	Off	same
Hold ⌥ key while dragging windows to tile	Desktop & Dock → Windows	Off	same
Stage Manager	Desktop & Dock	Off	it moves and resizes windows too
Other window managers	Rectangle, Magnet, Loop, Moom, …	Quit them	two apps moving the same windows

If macOS still switches desktops after you turn the swipe off, log out and back in: trackpad changes sometimes only apply then.

Set Swipe between full-screen apps to four fingers and Swipe between pages to two fingers, turn off Three Finger Drag (Accessibility → Pointer Control → Trackpad Options), and choose Three fingers in SlideScroll's Settings… → Windows.

Using SlideScroll

The strip. Each window is a column. The focused column is always fully on screen; columns past the edges wait just off screen, with a sliver showing. Focus a column and the strip scrolls just far enough to show it.

Swiping. Four fingers left or right drag the strip under your fingers. Let go and it glides to the nearest column. On multiple displays, the swipe scrolls the display under the pointer. Settings… → Windows switches to three fingers or reverses the direction.

Several displays. Each display has its own strip. Focusing left or right past the end of one strip carries on to the nearest column of the display beside it.

Dragging with the mouse.

• Drag a window by its title bar and drop it between two columns to reorder.
• Drop it with the pointer over the bottom quarter of another window to stack it below, or the top quarter (just under the title bar) to stack it above. A highlight shows where it will land.
• Drop it on another display to move it to that display's strip.
• Resize a window's side to set its column's width. Resize the edge between two stacked windows to share the height. A lone window keeps the height you give it.

Floating. Dialogs, panels and windows that can't be resized float above the strip on their own. Press ⌃⌥T to float or unfloat any window.

Pausing. Pause in the menu bar brings every window on screen and leaves them alone, with your shortcuts going to apps as usual, until you Resume.

Shortcuts

All shortcuts use ⌃ Control + ⌥ Option by default, so plain ⌥ stays free for typing accented characters. Every one can be changed: see Customising.

Action	Shortcut
Focus left / right	⌃⌥H ⌃⌥L or ⌃⌥← ⌃⌥→
Focus up / down in a stack	⌃⌥K ⌃⌥J or ⌃⌥↑ ⌃⌥↓
Focus first / last window	⌃⌥⌘← / ⌃⌥⌘→
Jump to window 1–9	⌃⌥1 … ⌃⌥9
Jump back to the previous window	⌃⌥⇥
Focus next display	⌃⌥N
Move column left / right	⌃⌥⇧H ⌃⌥⇧L or ⌃⌥⇧← ⌃⌥⇧→
Move window up / down in a stack	⌃⌥⇧K ⌃⌥⇧J or ⌃⌥⇧↑ ⌃⌥⇧↓
Move window to next display	⌃⌥⇧N
Pin column to left / right edge (again to unpin)	⌃⌥P / ⌃⌥⇧P
Float / unfloat window	⌃⌥T
Cycle width (¼, ⅓, ½, ⅔, ¾)	⌃⌥R
Full width (again to restore)	⌃⌥F
Centre column	⌃⌥C
Wider / narrower	⌃⌥= / ⌃⌥-
Taller / shorter in a stack	⌃⌥⇧= / ⌃⌥⇧-
Equal heights (a lone window gets full height back)	⌃⌥0
Stack into left / right column	⌃⌥[ / ⌃⌥]
Pop out of stack to the left / right	⌃⌥⇧[ / ⌃⌥⇧]
Tabbed column on / off	⌃⌥⇧T
Undo / redo a layout change	⌃⌥Z / ⌃⌥⇧Z
Quit (puts every window back on screen)	⌃⌥Q

Shortcuts and swipes do nothing in full-screen apps and on Spaces SlideScroll isn't managing, so they never scroll the strip behind your back.

Customising

Settings… → Windows chooses the swipe (three or four fingers, natural or reversed direction), the space between windows, and apps whose windows always float: they stay where you put them, outside the strip.

Open Settings… from the menu bar and pick the Shortcuts tab. Click any shortcut and press the new keys; each action has two slots. Esc cancels, Delete removes the shortcut, ↺ puts an action's defaults back. If a shortcut is already taken, it moves to the action you just set. Shortcuts need ⌃, ⌥ or ⌘, so they can't take over typing.

Shortcuts are stored by physical key, so they keep working when you switch keyboard layouts, and Settings labels them the way your keyboard does (on AZERTY you'll see ⌃⌥A where QWERTY shows ⌃⌥Q).

Settings are saved to ~/Library/Application Support/slidescroll/config.toml, which you can also edit by hand. It only lists what you've changed:

[keys]
focus_left = ["ctrl+alt+j", "ctrl+alt+left"]
cycle_width = ["ctrl+cmd+w"]
quit = []    # no shortcut

[swipe]
fingers = 3       # 3 or 4
natural = false   # reverse the direction

[layout]
gap = 12.0        # points between windows, 0 to 32
show_strip = false    # don't show app icons while moving along the strip

[apps]
float = ["Calculator", "System Settings"]

[apps.width]      # new windows of these apps open at this width
Ghostty = "1/3"   # "1/4", "1/3", "1/2", "2/3", "3/4", "full", or 0 to 1
"Google Chrome" = "2/3"

The widths are also in Settings… → Windows → Opening Width. They only apply to new windows. Windows SlideScroll already knows keep the width they had.

Scripting

Every action has a URL, so Raycast, Alfred, Shortcuts, BetterTouchTool, Hammerspoon and scripts can run it. The name is the action's config name, written with dashes:

open -g slidescroll://cycle-width
open -g slidescroll://focus-window-3
open -g slidescroll://toggle-pause      # also pause, resume, settings

The app's binary takes the same names, which is handy in a shell alias:

/Applications/SlideScroll.app/Contents/MacOS/slidescroll focus-left

Run it with an unknown name to list every action. Actions do nothing while SlideScroll is paused, except resume and toggle-pause.

Troubleshooting & FAQ

macOS also uses four-finger swipes for Swipe between full-screen apps. Set it to three fingers in System Settings → Trackpad → More Gestures (SlideScroll's menu warns about this and opens the pane for you). If a change doesn't take effect, log out and back in.

Open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility and make sure SlideScroll is on. After an update or a reinstall, SlideScroll removes the entry the previous build left there and asks again, so the switch you see is for the build you're running. If it's on and SlideScroll still waits, remove it with –, add it again from Applications, and relaunch.

That's macOS window tiling snapping it into place before SlideScroll puts it back. Turn off the three tiling options in Desktop & Dock → Windows.

Check SlideScroll isn't paused (its menu bar icon is dimmed when it is), and that another app hasn't claimed the same keys. You can change any shortcut in Settings….

Yes. SlideScroll manages the Space you start it on and leaves full-screen apps and other Spaces alone; switching back picks up where you left off. One strip per Space is on the roadmap.

Quitting (from the menu, ⌃⌥Q, logging out or shutting down) brings every window back on screen first. So does pausing, and so does a crash.

Turn on Verbose logging in Settings → General, reproduce the problem, then click Show Log in Finder and attach slidescroll.log to a new issue, with your macOS version and what you expected to happen.

Privacy

SlideScroll's only network access is checking GitHub for a new release, which Settings → General can turn off: no telemetry, no analytics, no account. It doesn't read what's in your windows or record your screen; it only asks macOS where windows are and moves them. Your layout, settings and log stay in your home folder.

How it works

• Layout (Sources/SlideScrollCore): the strip as a Swift value type with no macOS code, checked by swift run core-checks. Columns have a width; the viewport looks at the strip from scroll. Focusing a column scrolls just far enough to show it.
• Off-screen windows: macOS won't place a window fully off screen, so columns outside the viewport are parked against the nearest edge with 8 pt peeking out. On a side with another display, they park below the bottom edge instead, so they don't spill onto the neighbour.
• Stacks and tabs: a column can hold several windows, splitting its height by weights, or showing them as tabs under a frosted bar drawn in a non-activating panel, so clicking a tab never steals focus.
• Displays: one strip per display. Strips follow displays being added, removed or rearranged; a display that's unplugged and plugged back in gets its columns back.
• Moving windows: the Accessibility API (AXUIElement). AXEnhancedUserInterface is switched off only while a window is being moved, so apps don't animate on top of SlideScroll and screen readers keep working.
• Events: an AXObserver per app reports windows opening, closing, moving and focus changes. Moves made with the mouse button held are the user's own drags.
• Animation: each window follows a critically damped spring, stepped once per frame the display shows (CADisplayLink, macOS 14+). Moves, resizes and focus changes go to a queue per app that keeps only the latest request, so a slow app (Electron, Chrome) drops its own frames without slowing the others.
• Swipes: raw finger positions from Apple's private MultitouchSupport framework, loaded with dlopen.
• Shortcuts: a CGEventTap swallows key presses that match the keymap and sends commands to the engine.
• App: the engine runs on a serial queue of its own and never touches AppKit; the main thread has the menu bar item, the SwiftUI Settings window, the tab bars, and sleep, lock and display notifications.
• Resilience: the engine suspends while the Mac sleeps or is locked and re-syncs on wake, and puts every window back on screen when it quits.
• Spaces: when none of a strip's windows is on screen (another Space or a full-screen app), that strip pauses instead of treating them as closed.

Building from source

You need macOS 13 or later and Swift 5.10 or later (Xcode, or just the Xcode Command Line Tools).

git clone https://github.com/majnioui/SlideScroll.git
cd SlideScroll
swift run core-checks                  # checks for the layout model
scripts/bundle.sh                      # builds build/SlideScroll.app
open build/SlideScroll.app

Local builds are signed ad hoc, and macOS ties the Accessibility permission to the signature: after rebuilding, remove SlideScroll from the Accessibility list and allow it again. SIGN_IDENTITY="Developer ID Application: …" scripts/bundle.sh signs with your own certificate.

To run without a bundle (the permission then goes to your terminal app):

swift build -c release
.build/release/slidescroll --list              # read-only: what it sees, moves nothing
SLIDESCROLL_DEBUG=1 .build/release/slidescroll

Everything is logged to ~/Library/Logs/SlideScroll/slidescroll.log, and to the terminal when there is one. scripts/make-icon.sh redraws the app icon from scripts/icon.swift.

Releasing

Bump VERSION, add the release to CHANGELOG.md, commit, and check that CI is green on main. Then push a matching tag:

git tag v0.3.4 && git push origin v0.3.4

The Release workflow runs the checks, builds the app and publishes SlideScroll 0.3.4 with a disk image, a zip and checksums. scripts/package.sh makes the same files locally in build/dist. Builds are signed ad hoc unless the signing secrets listed in the workflow are set.

Signing. Without signing secrets, releases are signed ad hoc and users allow Accessibility again after each update. scripts/make-signing-cert.sh makes a free self-signed certificate and prints the three secrets to add; releases signed with it keep the permission across updates. A Developer ID in the same secrets, plus the notarization ones, also removes macOS's first-launch warning.

Roadmap

Done:

• Auto-updates, signed with a fixed certificate so updates keep the Accessibility permission
• Homebrew formula that builds from source
• Focus crosses displays: ⌃⌥→ on the last column moves to the next display
• Settings for the swipe (fingers, direction), the gap between windows, and apps that always float
• Setup checks in Settings that update as you fix them
• Animation timed to the display's refresh, with resizes that never stall it
• URL scheme and command line for every action
• Per-app opening widths
• A lone window keeps the height you drag it to
• Strip indicator: app icons while navigating, click to jump
• Undo the last layout change
• Jump back to the previously focused window
• Windows of the strip in the menu bar menu, click to jump

Planned:

• Notarized builds and an official Homebrew cask (need a paid Developer ID)
• One strip per Space; carry a window to another Space
• Leave chosen displays (presentation, portrait) unmanaged
• Overview: zoom out to the whole strip, click a window to jump to it
• Drag icons in the strip indicator to reorder columns
• Dim unfocused windows
• Centre modes (never / on overflow / always), focus follows mouse, mouse follows focus
• Preset heights in a stack (⅓ / ½ / ⅔), expand a column to fill the empty space beside it
• Scratch layer: one key shows or hides all floating windows
• Per-app rules: open in a fixed slot or pinned
• Open a window at its own height instead of filling the column
• Guided first run
• Raycast extension
• Scroll the strip with a mouse wheel while holding a modifier
• Named layouts: save a strip and bring it back later

Contributing

Bug reports, ideas and pull requests are welcome. For anything bigger than a small fix, please open an issue first so we can agree on the approach. Layout logic belongs in SlideScrollCore with a check in Sources/CoreChecks; run swift run core-checks before sending a pull request.

License

MIT © 2026 majnioui