AnyDoor

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A macOS menu bar control center driven by global hotkeys. Bind any key combination to launch and toggle apps, translate text, flip system settings, or run one-off actions — all without leaving the keyboard.

Press a shortcut to open an app. Press it again to hide it. Use the same muscle memory to mute audio, lock the screen, sample a color, OCR a screen region, translate selected or on-screen text, convert and compress images, or capture and record the screen — and reach for clipboard history, window layouts, /etc/hosts profiles, external-display brightness, a Hyper Key, and a Spotlight-style command palette when you need them.

Demo

promo-en.mp4

Features

App shortcuts

• Global hotkey per app — opens it when not running, activates it when backgrounded, hides it when frontmost.
• Inline hotkey recorder with live modifier detection and conflict prompts.
• Drag to reorder shortcuts; toggle visibility per item.

Built-in system toggles

Toggle	What it does
Keep Awake	Holds an IOPMAssertion to prevent display/system sleep
Mute Audio	Mutes/unmutes the default Core Audio output device
Dark Mode	Flips system appearance via AppleScript
Hide Desktop Icons	Toggles Finder's desktop icon visibility
Show Hidden Files	Toggles AppleShowAllFiles in Finder
Hide Dock	Toggles Dock auto-hide
Auto-hide Menu Bar	Toggles _HIHideMenuBar
Keyboard Lock	Drops all key events except registered hotkeys (cleaning mode)

Built-in actions

• Lock Screen, Display Sleep, System Sleep
• Empty Trash, Flush DNS cache
• Restart Finder / Dock / SystemUIServer + ControlCenter
• OCR a screen region — Vision framework recognizes text and copies it
• Scan QR / barcode — decode a code on screen and copy its payload
• Pick Color — system color sampler captures HEX into the clipboard
• Translate text — open the translation window, translate the current selection, or OCR a screen region and translate the recognized text

Screen capture

• One capture menu, one selection: a hotkey freezes the screen and shows a pre-adjustable selection (resize handles, move, re-drag; restored from the last selection) with an attached toolbar that switches tool on the fly — region, window, fullscreen, scrolling, and recording.
• Region, window, fullscreen, and timed capture — each also bindable to its own hotkey — over a freeze-screen overlay with a crosshair, live dimensions, a magnifier loupe, and arrow-key nudge/resize across every connected display.
• Scrolling capture for content taller than the screen: an interactive, CleanShot X-style session. You scroll the target — up or down — while AnyDoor grabs and stitches frames live (overlap-aligned, pixel-exact) behind a growing preview with a Done / Cancel bar; the session's own windows never enter the shot, and it reuses your last selection.
• Quick-access overlay docked in the bottom-left of the screen after a shot: a drag-to-share thumbnail plus copy, save, edit, pin on screen, OCR, re-capture, and delete (delete also drops it from clipboard history).
• Annotation editor: arrow, line, rectangle, ellipse, freehand, highlighter, text, blur, pixelate, redaction bar, numbered step counters, and non-destructive crop — with per-tool color / stroke / fill, undo/redo, and export to copy / save / pin.
• Pin any capture on screen as an always-on-top floating reference.
• Capture settings: save location, filename template, auto-save / auto-copy, timer-delay presets (3 / 5 / 10s), and quick-access overlay timeout.

Screen recording

• Record the full display or a selected region to MOV, MP4, or animated GIF via AVFoundation, with a configurable frame rate and optional cursor capture, microphone audio, a draggable webcam overlay, and an on-screen keystroke display.
• A floating control bar shows elapsed time with pause / resume and stop; the finished file is exported in the chosen format and revealed in Finder.
• System (application) audio is not captured — only the microphone.

Clipboard history

• Background watcher records text, images, and files copied to the pasteboard, with a searchable Liquid Glass "wall" to browse and re-paste.
• Recognizes text (OCR), barcodes, and colors inside captured images.
• Per-source exclusions — skip history from password managers and other chosen apps; excluded sources travel with backups.

Translation

• Translate typed text, the current text selection, or text recognized from a screen region.
• Run multiple services side by side: Apple on-device translation, Google, Bing, DeepL / DeepLX, and OpenAI-compatible providers such as OpenAI, DeepSeek, Qwen, Gemini, Kimi, GLM, OpenRouter, Ollama, or a custom endpoint.
• Configure default and fallback target languages; if source and target match, AnyDoor automatically uses the second target language.
• Per-service API keys are stored in Keychain. Service definitions, ordering, prompt templates, extra request body / headers, and manual-on-expand mode are configurable from Settings.
• Apple translation can download required language packs from the Translation settings tab on supported macOS versions.
• Translation history groups every provider result from the same run, supports favorites, copy, re-translate, retention trimming, and clear-all.
• Text-to-speech can read the source or translated text, with optional auto-speak for the first successful result.
• The selected-text fallback preserves the user's full pasteboard contents and suppresses AnyDoor's temporary copy/restore writes from clipboard history.

Image conversion

• Ships as an installable plugin — enable it from Settings → Plugins.
• A dedicated workspace window — bindable to a hotkey, which also echoes the current Finder selection into the basket — with a collapsible sidebar (⌘B) holding the pending basket and conversion history, an original/result comparison canvas, and a bottom control bar.
• Add images by drag & drop, ⌘O, or ⌘V (copied image files or a copied bitmap).
• Format mode converts to PNG, JPEG, HEIC, AVIF, WebP, TIFF, GIF, BMP, PDF, or ICO, with an exact live result preview — the same bytes a run would produce — updating as the quality slider moves.
• Target Size mode compresses to a byte budget while keeping the source format: JPEG / HEIC / AVIF / WebP via a bounded quality search, PNG by scaling down, with scaling always available as a fallback (floored at a 640 px longest edge). WebP output is encoded by the bundled libwebp. Already-fitting sources pass through byte-identical; an unreachable target shows an explicit banner with a best-effort Save Anyway.
• Convert All asks where to save the outputs and remembers the folder; runs are cancellable (⌘.).
• History records every conversion with its format, output file size, and time, plus reveal-in-Finder and copy actions.

Window layout

• Tile the focused window to halves, thirds, two-thirds, quarters, center, or maximize — each on its own optional hotkey.
• Move the focused window to the next / previous display.
• A Window Layout submenu in the panel exposes every arrangement.

External display brightness

• DDC/CI brightness control for external monitors over VCP 0x10, with an on-screen OSD.
• Architecture-aware backend (Apple Silicon vs. Intel) and global brightness up / down hotkeys.

Hosts management

• Ships as an installable plugin — enable it from Settings → Plugins.
• Edit /etc/hosts from a built-in editor with multiple named profiles and one-click switching.
• Writes go through a privileged XPC helper (an SMAppService daemon), falling back to an administrator-authorized AppleScript when the helper is not installed.

Hyper Key

• Remap Caps Lock (or another trigger) to a Hyper modifier (Control + Option + Command, optionally Shift) via hidutil.
• A quick tap can emit its own action (none / Escape / the original key), with a watchdog that re-applies the mapping and clears it on shutdown.

Scheduled shutdown

• Arm a one-shot shutdown after a chosen delay; it survives relaunch and is re-validated after the Mac wakes from sleep.
• A cancelable warning panel appears before it fires; execution is graceful (System Events) or forced (privileged helper).

Port Manager

• Submenu listing every listening port on the system.
• Search by port number or process name.
• Flat list and process-grouped tree views.
• Live refresh with retry on scan failure.

Command Palette

• A Spotlight-style launcher (global hotkey) that searches and runs any command, app, built-in, or listening port from one place.
• Inline calculator: type a math expression and the result appears at the top — press Return to copy it. Supports arithmetic, parentheses, powers (^), percentage literals (1234 * 8%), the constants pi / e, and scientific functions (sqrt, sin, log, pow, …; trig in radians). Bare numbers stay a port search; prefix with = to force calculation (e.g. =8080).
• Inline conversions: type a conversion and the answer appears on top — Return copies it. Units (length, mass, temperature, data size, speed) via 3 ft to m / 72 f to c / 1 gb to mib; time zones via 3pm tokyo / 9am london to tokyo; currency via 100 usd to eur (also $ / € / £, colloquial names like rmb / yuan / euro, and = as a connector), converted against ECB rates cached daily from Frankfurter and usable offline. A currency-only footer can force-refresh the rate table on demand.
• Inline developer tools: base64, url, and md5 / sha1 / sha256 encode or hash the rest of the query; pasting JSON pretty-prints / minifies it and a Unix epoch renders local / UTC / ISO 8601. A Raycast-style scope badge turns a keyword into a search-bar pill so the list stays exclusive to that tool.
• Script plugins add their own rows to the palette — searchable second-level lists and paginated markdown detail pages included (see Plugins).

Quicklinks

• User-defined command-palette entries that open a web URL, a file or folder, an app deeplink, or a search template with a {query} placeholder. The editor's Type picker adapts the field hint per kind and offers a native folder / file picker so a directory can be chosen without typing a path.
• Search Templates take inline arguments (gh AnyDoor); typing a template's keyword and pressing Tab collapses it into a badge in the search field so you type just the query next, and Backspace on the empty field sheds it.
• Assign a keyword for direct palette invocation or a global hotkey — plain links open immediately, Search Templates summon argument mode.
• Pin an Open With app to override the default handler (falls back to the system default if that app is gone); icons derive from the pinned app, file / folder metadata, the deeplink handler, or a cached web favicon.
• Drag to reorder, toggle visibility, and the whole configuration participates in backup / sync. A set of common templates (Google, GitHub, YouTube, Stack Overflow, npm, MDN, Google Translate, ChatGPT) is seeded out of the box.

Plugins

Optional features are plugins, managed from Settings → Plugins, in two kinds:

• Native plugins ship inside the app and toggle on and off — Image Conversion and Hosts management today. Uninstalling removes every surface (panel rows, palette commands, hotkeys) but keeps the plugin's data, so reinstalling restores it without a relaunch.
• Script plugins are packages you install yourself — authored in TypeScript, run on the system JavaScriptCore, and confined to the capabilities their manifest declares (no shell, no filesystem, no clipboard read; runaway scripts are killed by a watchdog). They extend the command palette with searchable rows, drill-in lists, and markdown detail pages. Install from a zip or an anydoor://install-plugin link; write your own with pnpm create @anydoor-dev/plugin and iterate live via developer mode.

Installation steps, the full capability table, authoring guide, and design records: docs/plugins.md.

Menu bar panel

• Click the menu bar icon to open a Liquid Glass panel listing every enabled item with its current state and hotkey.
• Hover the App Shortcuts or Port Manager rows to open side popovers.
• Toast feedback for OCR / color picker results.
• In-panel update banner when a new release is available.

Settings

• Panel tab: drag-to-reorder (top-level items and app-shortcut / window-layout children alike), per-item visibility, inline hotkey recorder, type badges (toggle / action / submenu).
• Quicklinks tab: create / edit command-palette entries with a link type picker, keyword, Open With override, hotkey, and visibility; drag to reorder.
• Clipboard tab: history monitoring, copy-only capture, retention window, per-source app exclusions, and clear-all history.
• Screenshot tab: save location, filename template, auto-save / auto-copy, timer-delay presets, quick-access overlay timeout, and recording options.
• Translation tab: target languages, auto-speak, service ordering, provider/API-key setup, Apple language-pack downloads, and history retention.
• Plugins tab: install / uninstall plugins, sideload script plugin packages, and manage script-plugin developer mode.
• General tab: launch at login, language, menu bar icon style, Hyper Key, command palette hotkey, scheduled shutdown, accessibility / automation / screen-recording permission status with one-click request, configuration backup / restore, and auto-update controls.

Auto-update

• Sparkle integration with EdDSA-signed appcast.
• Configurable check frequency (daily / weekly / off) and manual check.
• Update banner surfaces new versions inside the menu bar panel.

Config sync

Point every Mac at one folder inside your cloud drive (Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud Drive, NAS…) — or at a WebDAV directory (Nextcloud, 坚果云, Synology…) — and AnyDoor keeps app shortcuts, built-in preferences, Quicklinks, and portable settings in sync — no account, no server, offline gaps tolerated. Concurrent edits merge automatically: changes to different items all survive, deletions hold everywhere, and cloud clients never see conflicting writes because each Mac only writes its own state file. Optional and off by default; machine-local state (helper approval, Script Plugins, the folder choice itself) never travels.

Setup, what syncs, conflict semantics, and troubleshooting: docs/config-sync.md.

Backup & restore

• Export app shortcuts, built-in preferences, clipboard / capture settings, translation target languages, auto-speak, service definitions, the installed plugin set, and other whitelisted general settings into a versioned snapshot, and import it on another Mac.
• Clipboard history, translation history, API keys, and machine-specific keys are excluded; app paths are re-resolved from bundle IDs on import, and changes apply without a relaunch.
• For continuous multi-Mac convergence use Config sync instead; backup stays the one-shot migration/sharing tool.

Security & permissions

• Runs as an .accessory app (no Dock icon).
• Accessibility and Automation permission flows built into Settings with live status indicators.
• CGEvent tap at HID level with a watchdog that restarts itself if macOS disables it for exceeding the callback budget.

Requirements

• macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later
• Liquid Glass effects light up on macOS 26 (Tahoe); macOS 14–25 fall back to a standard material surface.
• Swift 6.2
• Accessibility permission (System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility)

Install

git clone https://github.com/ZingerLittleBee/AnyDoor.git
cd AnyDoor
make install

This builds the release binary and installs /Applications/AnyDoor.app with the app bundle metadata and icon.

For a binary-only build, use:

make swift-release

The binary will be at .build/release/AnyDoor.

Usage

1. Run AnyDoor — an icon appears in the menu bar
2. Click the icon → Settings to open the settings window
3. Click + to add a binding:
   • Click the shortcut field and press your desired key combination
   • Click Select... to choose the target app
   • Click Save
4. Press the shortcut to toggle the app (open/hide/activate)

Development

# Hot-reload dev mode (requires watchexec)
make

# Build
make build

# Release build only
make swift-release

Release Packaging

Releases are signed with Developer ID, notarized with Apple, packaged as a DMG and Sparkle zip, then published to GitHub Releases with an updated appcast. The release Make targets automatically load .env through bash, so the same commands work from fish, zsh, bash, or sh.

Packaging commands

# Build the release binary only.
make swift-release

# Build and install /Applications/AnyDoor.app for local use.
make install

# Remove /Applications/AnyDoor.app.
make uninstall

# Download the pinned Sparkle command line tools.
make sparkle-tools

# Create or update the notarytool keychain profile from .env.
make notary-profile

# Verify the Developer ID signing identity in the login keychain.
security find-identity -v -p codesigning

# Verify the notarytool keychain profile from .env.
make notary-check

# Validate the full release pipeline without committing, tagging, pushing,
# or creating a GitHub release.
make release-dryrun 1.0.1

# Omit the version to auto-increment the patch version from Info.plist.
make release-dryrun

# Publish a real signed and notarized release.
make release 1.1.0

One-time machine setup

1. Copy .env.example to .env and fill the local release values.

   Keep .env local only. It is ignored by git. Fill APPLE_ID, APPLE_TEAM_ID, NOTARY_PROFILE, SIGNING_IDENTITY, and REPO_URL. Leave APPLE_APP_SPECIFIC_PASSWORD empty after the notary profile has been saved to Keychain.

2. Confirm the Developer ID signing identity exists in the login keychain:

   security find-identity -v -p codesigning

   The expected identity is:

   Developer ID Application: Bee Zinger (9VM4RM39R3)

3. Create the notarytool keychain profile if it does not already exist:

   make notary-profile

   Enter the Apple app-specific password at the secure prompt. After this succeeds, the password is stored in Keychain under NOTARY_PROFILE; it is not needed for future release builds and should not remain in .env.

4. Verify the notary profile:

   make notary-check

5. Install the local release tools:

   brew install create-dmg
   make sparkle-tools

6. Confirm GitHub CLI authentication:

   gh auth status -h github.com

Dry run

Run this before every real release. It signs, notarizes, packages, signs the Sparkle update, and generates appcast.xml, but stops before committing, tagging, pushing, or creating a GitHub release. Candidate artifacts are built in an isolated temporary directory; tracked release files and temporary artifacts are restored when the command succeeds, fails, or is interrupted.

This uses the same preflight checks as a real release: run it from a clean main branch that is in sync with origin/main.

make release-dryrun 1.0.1

If no version is passed, the script increments the patch version from the current CFBundleShortVersionString. The current value must already be strict MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH.

The successful command leaves the working tree clean and does not overwrite an existing dist/ directory.

Real release

Real releases must run from a clean main branch that is in sync with origin/main. The CHANGELOG.md ## [Unreleased] section must be non-empty.

git checkout main
git pull --ff-only origin main

make release 1.1.0

Pass the version explicitly for real releases.

The release script bumps Info.plist, moves the changelog entry, builds, codesigns, notarizes, packages the DMG and zip, regenerates the Sparkle appcast, commits, tags, pushes, creates a draft GitHub release, uploads assets, and then publishes it.

How It Works

• CGEvent tap at HID level (.cghidEventTap) intercepts keyboard events before any app
• SwiftData persists key bindings across launches
• AppKit menu bar — an NSStatusItem plus a floating NSPanel (managed by MenuBarController), not SwiftUI's MenuBarExtra
• Privileged XPC helper writes /etc/hosts after verifying the caller's code signature
• Translation coordinator fans out requests to enabled providers, records per-run history, and guards stale async results from superseded runs
• App runs as an accessory (no Dock icon)

Tech Stack

• SwiftUI views hosted in AppKit windows + AppKit menu bar (NSStatusItem + NSPanel)
• SwiftData
• JavaScriptCore for the script plugin runtime
• CGEvent tap (.cghidEventTap)
• Privileged XPC helper for /etc/hosts
• Vision OCR, Natural Language detection, AVFoundation speech, and Apple's Translation framework when available
• Swift Package Manager

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md for the development setup, code conventions, and pull-request process. For larger changes, please open an issue first to discuss the idea.

Acknowledgements

Bundled third-party code; full license texts in THIRD-PARTY-LICENSES.md.

• MonitorControl (MIT) — its IntelDDC is vendored for DDC/CI brightness control of external displays on Intel Macs (itself adapted from @reitermarkus's work).
• Sparkle (MIT) — application auto-update.
• AskForPermission (MIT) — macOS accessibility permission helper.
• libwebp (BSD-3-Clause) — WebP encoding for Image Conversion (via SDWebImage/libwebp-Xcode); macOS decodes WebP natively but cannot encode it.

License

MIT