Somee Lab
KO EN
← Apps category
Apps 7분 읽기

Why I Built a Radial Launcher for macOS — The Cirki Story

Raycast and Alfred didn't quite fit. In that gap grew a circular app launcher that opens right where your cursor is.

There’s a specific kind of friction that accumulates quietly. You’re mid-thought, you need to switch apps, and your fingers go straight to Cmd+Tab. One press, two, three. You’re counting. The app you want is somewhere in that row of thumbnails. You overshoot, backtrack, and by the time you land on the right window, the thought has gone soft around the edges.

Some days you give up on the keyboard entirely and reach for the mouse to find the Dock. That’s the moment the flow breaks — not dramatically, just a small, familiar interruption. The kind you stop noticing until you suddenly do.

The macOS launcher space has real options. Spotlight is free, always there, and requires nothing from you — but it offers almost nothing back either. You can’t rearrange how it works, can’t assign items, can’t build habits around its shape. It’s a search box. Alfred has been a staple for years. The free tier covers basic launching; the Powerpack (a one-time ~£34 purchase) unlocks workflows that power users have been customizing for a decade. Raycast arrived more recently and spread fast. Its extension ecosystem is large, its keyboard-first design is polished, and the free core is genuinely capable. The paid Pro tier adds AI and collaboration features for around $10 per month.

All of them share one shape: a narrow, centered command palette drops into the middle of your screen. You type, a list appears, you scroll or filter, you press Enter. The interface assumes you remember names. The more tools you add, the more commands you accumulate. Eventually you find yourself searching for things you know exist but can’t quite recall what they’re called.

That’s not a knock on those tools. For automation-heavy workflows, for people who live in search, the command palette is the right shape. But it’s not the only shape a launcher could take.

Cirki starts from a different premise.

Press Option+Tab and a radial menu opens directly around your cursor — wherever that cursor happens to be on screen. Your apps are arranged in a circle, evenly spaced. Moving your mouse upward selects the app at the top. Right means the app on the right. The direction is the decision.

No typing. No list to scan. No window appearing in some fixed position that your eyes have to travel to find.

The first time you use it, the layout feels unfamiliar. That’s normal. But after two or three days, something shifts. You stop thinking about where the apps are and start simply moving toward them. Slack is upper-left. Terminal is lower-right. Browser is straight up. Your hand remembers the direction before your conscious mind does.

This is the design principle Cirki is built around: spatial memory is faster than name memory. Knowing where something is tends to be more reliable than knowing what it’s called, especially under pressure, especially when you’re already thinking about something else.

The radial menu is the center of the experience, but several details shape how it actually feels to use.

Number keys 1 through 9 correspond to slots in the menu. If you know a specific app is in slot 3, you press Option+Tab and then 3. No cursor movement at all. For apps you launch constantly, this becomes reflex.

There’s also a mode called release-to-launch. Hold Option+Tab, move to the app icon, release. The shortcut key itself is the trigger. Press, aim, let go. Three motions that flow into one. It feels closer to a gesture than a keyboard command.

Favorite apps can be pinned to fixed positions in the ring. Everything else fills in automatically based on most recent use. You don’t configure this — it just reflects your actual patterns over time. The apps you return to most often surface to the front. The ones you haven’t touched in a while recede.

If you work with clusters of related tools, groups let you organize them. A design group might hold Figma, Sketch, and Preview. A development group might hold VS Code, Terminal, and Postico. Selecting a group slot expands a fan of the apps inside. The metaphor extends naturally: menu within menu, direction within direction.

There’s a second mode that operates separately. Press Control+Tab and a radial menu appears showing keyboard shortcuts for whichever app currently has focus. Switch to a different app and the menu updates automatically. In Figma, you see Figma shortcuts. In Terminal, terminal shortcuts. In Safari, Safari shortcuts.

This isn’t a replacement for learning shortcuts over time. It’s a reference that lives in the same spatial layer as your work, available without breaking attention to go look something up.

One more integration worth noting: if you start typing while the radial menu is open, Cirki hands off to Spotlight or Raycast, whichever you already use. It’s not trying to replace search. It’s trying to be the layer you reach for first, and to gracefully pass off the cases where search is the better tool.

Cirki lives in the menu bar. There’s no Dock icon. It stays out of your way until the shortcut wakes it up. The app requires macOS 14.0 or later.

Themes follow Light, Dark, or System. Menu size, icon size, label visibility, and all shortcuts are adjustable. Seven languages are supported: Korean, English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, German, and French.

Pricing is a 7-day trial followed by a one-time purchase of US$7.99. No subscription. You pay once and it’s yours.

The honest version of who this is for: if Raycast is working well for you, you probably don’t need Cirki. If you’ve built Alfred workflows you rely on, switching costs are real. Command palette interfaces are powerful and well-understood.

Cirki is for the person who finds the centered palette slightly awkward — not broken, just slightly off. The person who wants the menu to appear where they are, not in the middle of the screen where they have to go. The person who switches apps frequently enough that the act of switching should feel like almost nothing.

It’s also for people who are tired of remembering names. The cognitive overhead of a growing launcher — all those commands, all those plugin names, all those shortcut strings — adds up. Spatial layout doesn’t ask as much of you. You learn a position once and it stays.

There’s something quiet about a tool that gets out of the way this completely. No window cluttering your screen. No mandatory typing. Just a circle that opens, an app you choose, and then it’s gone.

The first week is the interesting part. On day one, you’ll reach for Cmd+Tab out of habit and miss the radial menu entirely. By day two, you’ll start using Option+Tab deliberately and feel slower — because you are, briefly. By day four or five, you’ll notice yourself switching apps without thinking about which direction to go. You just move there. That’s when the spatial memory has taken over. It happens faster than most interface changes because directions are coarser than names; you only need to remember “up-left” instead of the specific letters of an app name.

After that, what you gain isn’t speed, exactly — command palette launchers can also feel fast. It’s something closer to reduced cognitive load. The part of your brain that was searching doesn’t have to work anymore. You’re not recalling and confirming and choosing from a list. You’re just pointing. The decision collapses into the motion.

If you want to try it:

한국어로 읽기 →